Physicist of the Month

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John Archibald Wheeler was born in Jacksonville, Florida and received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1933.

Wheeler was one of the pioneers of the theory of nuclear fission (with Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi), and participated in the development of the U.S. atomic bomb under the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos during World War II. Later he went on to participate in the development of the American hydrogen bomb under Project Matterhorn B.

In the 1960s, he formulated the so-called geometrodynamics, a program of physical (and ontological) reduction of every physical phenomenon such as gravitation and electromagnetism to the geometrical properties of a (curved) space-time. Aiming at a systematical identification of matter with space, geometrodynamics has often been said to be a systematic prolongation of the philosophy of nature as conceived by Descartes and Spinoza. Wheeler's geometrodynamics, however, failed to explain some important physical phenomena, such as the existence of fermions or that of gravitational singularities. Wheeler himself therefore abandoned this theory in the early 1970s. Wheeler is truly an almost metaphysical thinker as he ponders the concept that the very laws of physics may be evolving analogous to the fashion of natural selection and evolution in biology. One of his quotes is: "How does something arise from nothing?", referring to the concepts of space and time (Princeton Physics News, 2006).

Wheeler has made some very important contributions to theoretical physics. His career has included work on the theory of gravitational collapse, and he coined the term "black hole" in 1967. Later he was also a pioneer in the field of quantum gravity studies with his development (with Bryce DeWitt) of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation or "wave function of the Universe."

He was a professor of physics at Princeton University from 1938-1976, then a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin. The list of Professor Wheeler's graduate students includes Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne and James Hartle. He gave a high priority to teaching, presenting himself even to freshman undergraduates and was extremely effective in the classroom as a teacher and as an inspiration.

He often chose to teach freshman physics, even after he had achieved great fame, saying that the young minds were most important. He always taught with great inspiration, imagination and was truly exemplary in conveying complex ideas. John Archibald Wheeler was awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1997. As of 2006 he still maintains an office in Jadwin Hall at Princeton University.

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler), 31 March 2006.

 

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