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

Re:What about Hawking?

[Malk-a-mite]

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

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.

Re:What about Hawking?

[maxwell demon]

He's in a chair.

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

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 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

[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.)

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 @_@

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:What do you mean dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

another obit

[call -151]

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