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