Physicist John A. Wheeler is Dead at 96

reverseengineer writes "Eminent physicist John Archibald Wheeler has died from pneumonia at the age of 96. The coiner of the terms 'black hole' and 'wormhole,' Wheeler popularized the study of general relativity, and advised a distinguished list of graduate students including Kip Thorne and Richard Feynman. Other work included a collaboration with Niels Bohr to develop the 'liquid drop' model of nuclear fission. Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of Dr. Wheeler, 'For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.'"

Comments

What about Hawking?

[Garridan]

'For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.'

What -- has Steven Hawking retired, or died?

Re:What about Hawking?

[Garridan]

ugh. s/Steven/Stephen/

Re:What about Hawking?

[Malk-a-mite]

Key word standing... Hawking hasn't been standing for years.

Re:What about Hawking?

[maxwell demon]

He's in a chair.

That's OK as long as he stays clear from Redmont.

Re:What about Hawking?

[Thyamine]

It's simply his opinion, so there's not much to say about it. Certainly someone can say Hawking did such and such, to provide evidence to the contrary, but really I think it comes down to looking into the past and seeing icons and titans that we don't have today. Perhaps it's those rosy colored glasses we wear when reminiscing, or maybe things really were grander back then. In either case, he was looking for something nice to say about a man he admired, and there's not much else to read into it.

Sad day

[techpawn]

We will miss the man that proved the Universe falls inwards onto itself at points or at least just sucks really hard.

RIP

[apodyopsis]

I'm not interested in a flame war about Hawking. Or interested in a "debate" about his contributions to fat man and Nagasaki. He clearly was a genius in many fields, who helped advance science, was widely regarded by his peers and his comments on his part in the development on nuclear warfare makes it very very clear his interest lied only in stopping the war quickly to save millions of lives.

A great man has died, RIP.
My condolences top his next of kin.

Went to high school with two of his grandkids

[Reality Master 201]

He came in once or twice to talk to the physics classes - nice man.

Condolences to the family.

Not that great

[Zerth]

He only has an Erds number of 3. Amateur.

Re:Not that great

[syrinx]

The vowel in question in "Erdos" is an o with double-acute-accent, not an umlaut... see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_alphabet if you care. :)

Re:Old theoretical physicists never die...

[maxwell demon]

Well, he passed the event horizon between life and death.

That it's an event horizon is proved by the facts that no one ever came back, we don't get any information from the other side, and sooner or later we all will fall through it.

Not just a nice man

[techpawn]

What makes a person great is that they are still humble in spite of their greatness.

In your remembrance of him, you make him out not just as a nice man, but, indeed as a great man.

Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist

[eldavojohn]

What -- has Steven Hawking retired, or died? First off, physicist John A. Wheeler is dead. I am sorry that the community and most importantly his family has lost an icon. I'm glad he was able to live such a full life and I hope that he was able to die happy of everything he has contributed to the human race.

Secondly while Hawking has made several important discoveries, he was cited by my college physics professor to be a 'pop' physicist. Hawking is a genius but mostly in theoretical physics. My professor also degraded Brian Greene to a much further point by saying he was nothing more than someone relaying physics to the general public. I also got into an argument about Sagan but I had an even harder time defending Sagan than Hawking.

While I've read books about the nature of space-time by Hawking, I noticed they were often co-written with Roger Penrose. In fact, if I were to ask you the most famous work of Hawking, what would you say? Probably A Brief History of Time.

What might follow is arguments of who is more important, the man who discovers this science or the man who makes it easily accessible and digestible by a vast majority of the five billion simpletons living on the earth?

Perhaps it can be said that Hawking is more than a pop-physicist but I'm aware of criticisms that he's mostly a public figure with a very romantic story behind him--condemned to a chair he took to books and became a brilliant scientist! I read his works and love him but I'm not a physicist so maybe that's why?

At any rate, whenever anyone dies a lot more respect is delivered unto them. Although I don't remember people saying much about Paul Erdos, I was shocked when people recognized Stanislaw Lem's death on such a large scale. It's a sad fact of our society, your work is commonly overlooked until you're dead.

Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist

[Dachannien]

a vast majority of the five billion simpletons living on the earth Actually, there are six billion simpletons living here. It's just that roughly one billion of them have firmly convinced themselves that they're not simpletons.

Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist

[Angostura]

he was cited by my college physics professor to be a 'pop' physicist.

Was your college physics professor perhaps a rather bitter man whose own book had failed to sell terribly well?

Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist

[Anonymous Coward]

And thirdly, there is still one physics superstar left: Steven Weinberg.

Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist

[D Ninja]

Actually, there are six billion simpletons living here. It's just that roughly one billion of them have firmly convinced themselves that they're not simpletons. I think it would be more fair to say that six billion of them have firmly convinced themselves that they're not simpletons...

Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist

[CheshireCatCO]

Exactly. Hawking is a damn smart guy, but he's not an Einstein or Fermi. Wheeler was in that class. He also left a huge mark on physics with his students from over the years, including Kip Thorne (whom I've frequently heard called the greatest black hole theorist alive, Hawking not withstanding), Hugh Everett (many-worlds interpretation) and Richard Feynman (who needs no parenthetical... d'oh!).

I also got into an argument about Sagan but I had an even harder time defending Sagan than Hawking. Really? I mean, Hawking has done some good work and all, but Sagan is *huge* in the field of planetary science, and not just for his popularization efforts. (Also note that he was popularizing when it was an huge uphill battle against his fellow scientists and not much of a road to glory.) His body of work on planetary atmospheres is sizable and he's another guy whose students have gone on to dominate the field.

Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist

[Dasher42]

What might follow is arguments of who is more important, the man who discovers this science or the man who makes it easily accessible and digestible by a vast majority of the five billion simpletons living on the earth?

You know you're on Slashdot when someone speaks so condescendingly of most of humanity for their lack of PhD-level expertise in a specific field and gets modded interesting. I challenge you to take a few good cultural anthropology classes. Just a few. The human experience does not begin or end in a physics lab.

Here a great man has passed in a great field, and we mar that with misanthropy.

Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist

[JustinOpinion]

Secondly while Hawking has made several important discoveries, he was cited by my college physics professor to be a 'pop' physicist. I think that's rather harsh. I mean, if a genius who publishes significant theoretical work and has made substantial original contributions to physics (e.g. Hawking radiation) can't be considered a "real" physicist, then who is?

By such a strict classification system, there are only two dozen physicists on Earth... and the thousands of professors in the physics departments of the world are then only 'pop' physicists?

Hawking may be more well-known for his popularization than for his fundamental contributions, but his work in both areas is significant. He's a real scientist who understands physics at a deep level, and calling him a 'pop' physicist is unfair.

(Note: There certainly are some professors who make little to no impact on research, and who are only good at popularizing science. Those are the 'pop' scientists, in my opinion.)

Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist

[PvtVoid]

Secondly while Hawking has made several important discoveries, he was cited by my college physics professor to be a 'pop' physicist. Hawking is a genius but mostly in theoretical physics. My professor also degraded Brian Greene to a much further point by saying he was nothing more than someone relaying physics to the general public. Here are citation summaries for Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene. Unless your college physics professor is Ed Witten, he would probably do well to shut the fuck up.

Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist

[John Miles]

What might follow is arguments of who is more important, the man who discovers this science or the man who makes it easily accessible and digestible by a vast majority of the five billion simpletons living on the earth?

Regardless what the objective answer to that turns out to be, elitism isn't healthy. Those 5E9 simpletons -- or at least the ones in the US, Europe, and Russia -- are the ones who pay for all the expensive research toys like the LHC. I think the most important role of a Hawking or a Sagan is to help explain what the "simpletons" are getting for their money.

Put another way: no matter how "smart" you are, you can be replaced. Some bored kid, somewhere, will gladly do your job, and probably for fun. Everybody knows about the rivalry between Newton and Leibniz, right? If one of them had been run over by a bus^H^H^H horse, it would've been a shame, but we'd still be where we are today, give or take a few years. Even work as apparently-revolutionary as Einstein's early stuff was more a synthesis of current ideas than anything truly new.

But if you're a good "explainer," you really are indispensible. By educating, challenging, and inspiring the tax base, those guys and gals make everybody else's work possible. And by making tedious fields of study seem romantic and boundless, they recruit future generations of researchers, some of whom will make a real difference.

Right now, every technical field from physics to biology to space science is suffering these days for want of more Sagans and Hawkings. It was not only petty and lame for your professor to criticize Hawking for being a "pop physicist," but it was out-and-out counterproductive.

Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist

[glitch23]

Hawking is a genius but mostly in theoretical physics.

So? I didn't relize theoretical physics was less important than other fields such as particle physics.

While I've read books about the nature of space-time by Hawking, I noticed they were often co-written with Roger Penrose. In fact, if I were to ask you the most famous work of Hawking, what would you say? Probably A Brief History of Time.

So? Many people collaborate on projects, especially books. In the making of *any* books, tens if not hundreds of people can be involved. Of course that gets widdled down to 1 or 2 people as far as authors are concerned but it still takes more than 1 person to write a book. Given that Hawking can't write (but can do calculations in his head) I don't think it takes away from the quality of his work that he has a collaborator on his books. Penrose also has written the Forewords/Preface to books as well.

It's a sad fact of our society, your work is commonly overlooked until you're dead.

The problem is that scientists who propose something that goes against the status quo are ignored for some reason and it sometimes takes 2 or 3 people over a period of decades to propose the same thing either independently or by finding documented research by Person A for someone else to take notice of Person A's original work. I guess it is a much slower version of the peer review process. Given that it takes a while and people only survive for ~80 years, there is a good chance that by the time a scientist's work that was originally ignored for being fringe or just ahead of its time is rediscovered the scientist is dead. This has happened many times over the centuries.

With that said, I don't think the issue with Wheeler was that his work was overlooked, as in ignored. I've heard his name in many of the cosmology books I've read but his work was so far above my head that I did overlook it for that reason but I'm a layman. Other physicists I'm sure rely heavily on his work as background information and as a basis for further research into various topics. He was like a grandfather for some people.

You might want to look at his publishing record

[Anonymous Coward]

While Hawking has acheived fame for his popular science books, he has contributed immensely to the current state of physics thinking. The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time , co-authored with G.F.R Ellis (Cambridge University Press, 1973) is vastly influential.

I don't get this tendency for people to think that if someone produces popular science books, they must be an intellectual lightweight who can't make real contributions to the field.

Re:You might want to look at his publishing record

[xtracto]

I don't get this tendency for people to think that if someone produces popular science books, they must be an intellectual lightweight who can't make real contributions to the field.

I, on the contrary think that it is _those_ scientists who can communicate science to the general population the ones who really are worth their salt. Because they are the ones who *really* understand the subject they are describing and who also are able to transfer such knowledge to other people.

Dyson, Gell-Man

[weston]

Freeman Dyson and Murray Gell-Mann aren't exactly chopped liver either, and they could more or less be put in the same pantheon of Titans including Wheeler and Feynman (even though I think there's arguments to be made that Wheeler and Feynman were just a little extra special).

Hawking... I don't know. I can't deny he's been a good interface between the field and its popular discussion, or that he's been a good cosmologist, but it's hard for me to see him in the same way these figures who basically invented large swaths of modern physics.

Re:Dyson, Gell-Man

[MightyMartian]

Well, if any still-living physicist sits in the top echelon of science, it is Hawking, who did do some revolutionary research in his time (the man is in his late 60s now, and at that age you don't usually expect to much original research).

But as to the underlying notion that somehow there was this era of supermen of physics, I suppose it's true to a point, but even the greats were standing on the shoulders of giants. The chief difference, I suspect, is that during the late 19th and into the first half of the 20th century there was a considerable amount of public appetite for science. Men like Einstein were idiosyncratic demi-gods in many peoples' eyes. There was a drama to it all, and scientists were seen as almost epic figures, unlocking the secrets of the universe and ushering in a new age of reason and enlightenment. World War 2 and the rise of atomic weapons ended that, and in particular, the Cold War encouraged much more practical science, while theoretical physics to some degree slipped into the shadows, with about the only time it ever really gained any attention being Hawking and Penrose's work and String Theory.

There is no lack of exciting research today, and we certainly have some great scientists, but the general attitude of the public to science seems to be a combination of apathy and mistrust. As well, physics is currently in a bit of a consolidation period, not so much revolution as evolution as the stunning discoveries of the last hundred years percolate and the much harder, and much more thankless work of trying to sort out just what all these giants had discovered means. The biggest problem is the unification of GR and Quantum Mechanics, and I think once we get that, we'll probably see a new era of giants as the full implications of that union once again revolutionizes our view of the universe.

Google Wheeling & INFORMATION THEORY

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

Good grief, people, this is Slashdot: The guy was working on INFORMATION THEORETIC approaches to quantum mechanics [and coming up with all sorts of bizarre contradictions therein] when he was in his 70's & 80's [i.e. at an age when most people are going senile].

Re:I think it is all "relative"

[Knuckles]

the large hardon collider @_@

RIP, he was a really good writer also

[rimugu]

He was a very good writer and that is what I knew about him until now. He wrote a series of paper explaining physics topics in lay man terms. I read several of them in the middle 90's using a dial up connection.
I will have to do a big search to find the current home for those papers. (if anyone knows, please share).

Cool

[SleptThroughClass]

Wheeler's entropy is now increasing. His temporary reversal of entropy has ended.

Re:What do you mean dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

He's not dead, his wave function has merely collapsed.

OTOH

[DeadDecoy]

Erds only has a Wheeler number of 3. Who's the amateur now?

An author, too

[AdamHaun]

Wheeler might be better known as part of the Misner/Thorne/Wheeler team that produced the Bible of General Relativity, but he's also the co-author of Spacetime Physics, one of the best SR books I've ever read. It's part of the school of physics textbooks that puts equations in service of language where they belong. If you have a basic physics background and want to learn more about relativity without wading through tons of Lorentz transfomations, give it a try.

another obit

[call -151]

There is a nice rememberance of Wheeler from one of his former students at the cosmic variance blog.

Pop Physicist?

[jotaeleemeese]

What is your college Professor? An amateur physicist?

Honestly, to say that about a man holding the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics position in Cambridge is a little bit rich.

Hawking (working with Penrose, what is wrong with that? He can defend himslef if he thinks he is not receiving the credit he deserves) has hinted to some of the most insightful findings about the nature of the universe (he is the person closest so far to demonstrate that god does not exist. If that is pop physics, well, I am Mickey Mouse then).

You (And Several Others) Misunderstand

[eldavojohn]

What might follow is arguments of who is more important, the man who discovers this science or the man who makes it easily accessible and digestible by a vast majority of the five billion simpletons living on the earth?

You know you're on Slashdot when someone speaks so condescendingly of most of humanity for their lack of PhD-level expertise in a specific field and gets modded interesting. I challenge you to take a few good cultural anthropology classes. Just a few. The human experience does not begin or end in a physics lab. You misunderstand me. By stating that I read these pop physicist books, I was implying that I'm one of those five billion simpletons. I am simple, especially compared to any physicist or my college professor even. I was not great at physics which is why I code computers for a living now.

I've taken cultural anthropology classes--even while in college! I still read many books about Native American/First Nation, Inuit, Inca, Pima, Hopi, Aztec and League of Five Nations peoples. I love their culture! I find more reward from reading their religious ceremonies and beliefs than I ever did find in the bible!

Here a great man has passed in a great field, and we mar that with misanthropy. "Misanthropy?" Ha! By acknowledging that there are people smarter than other people, you assume I meant misanthropy? At least I started my post with condolences to Wheeler's colleagues, his family and thanking him for everything he did for us. How do you feel about "the death of a great man?" I wouldn't know, you spent your time attacking me for calling most of the populace of the world simple.

I'm not a physicist, I was merely hoping to relay what my physics professor had told me about being a real physicist. I never even sad I believe it, I admire all these men mentioned and feel a simpleton myself compared to them.

What in the hell is wrong with being simple anyway?

Penny

[rotenberry]

When Prof. Wheeler was at the University of Texas (and probably at Princeton as well) he used to give a penny to any student who found an error in what he had written on the chalkboard in class.

I wish I had kept mine.