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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.'"
Key word standing... Hawking hasn't been standing for years.
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.
That's OK as long as he stays clear from Redmont.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
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.
My work here is dung.
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.
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.
Tweet, tweet.
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].
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
There is a nice rememberance of Wheeler from one of his former students at the cosmic variance blog.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.