Physicist John Wheeler died on Sunday aged 96.
“For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing,” says Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (NY Times).
His description of General Relativity remains one of the best there is: “mass tells space how to curve, space tells mass how to move”.
Daniel Holz worked with Wheeler and has written a wonderful tribute at the Cosmic Variance blog. On Wheeler’s work he notes:
He did foundational work on quantum mechanics, collaborating with Niels Bohr on some of the earliest work in nuclear fission. He invented the S-matrix. He played important roles in both the Manhattan project (atomic bomb) and the Matterhorn project (Hydrogen bomb). He made major contributions to general relativity, co-authoring with Charlie Misner and Kip Thorne the bible of the field. He was legendary for his way with words, coining such terms as wormholes, quantum foam, black holes, and the wave function of the Universe (the Wheeler-DeWitt equation). He trained generations of students; one of his first was Richard Feynman.
He also notes what he was like as a person, with this my favourite detail:
He would always take the stairs. (‘ No time to wait for an elevator!’) He would hook his arm into the banisters, and swing around, practically leaping from one flight to the next. This was 1990; Wheeler was 79 years old.
More tributes below the fold as they come in.
A giant, a pioneer in physics died today. John Archibald Wheeler was a genius, an amazing physicist who felt that teaching as well as research was important.
The concept of a star so massive that not even light could escape had been discussed long before the equations of general relativity suggested the possibility, but no one had come up with a good term for the idea. Probably the most well-know phrase before “black hole” was “frozen star,” which doesn’t quite create the same image in the mind as “black hole” does.
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As someone who studied general relativity as a graduate student, I used Wheeler’s classic co-authored textbook on the subject: Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler . It’s one of the clearest explanations of general relativity for the physicist that I have ever seen.
Pick of the obituaries