John Wheeler named black holes, wormholes and quantum foam, and taught Feynman
John Archibald Wheeler had a gift for names. He popularised black hole, coined wormhole, quantum foam and it from bit, and even renamed Enrico Fermi's slower downer the neutron moderator. Stephen Hawking called him the hero of the black hole story.
Born in Jacksonville, Florida, on July 9, 1911, the eldest of four children of two librarians, Wheeler spent a year at a one-room school on a Vermont farm before finishing high school in Baltimore. He had his doctorate from Johns Hopkins at 21, then studied with Gregory Breit in New York and Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. With Breit in 1934 he described how two colliding photons might turn into an electron and a positron, now called the Breit–Wheeler process.
In 1939 Bohr brought news of nuclear fission to America, and he and Wheeler used the liquid drop model to explain it; while walking to a meeting, Bohr realised slow neutrons split uranium-235. Their first paper appeared on September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland. During the war Wheeler helped design reactors for the Manhattan Project and, at Hanford, diagnosed why a reactor mysteriously shut down and restarted: xenon-135, a fission product that soaks up neutrons. The personal stakes were real; his brother Joe, fighting in Italy, sent a postcard reading hurry up, and was killed in October 1944. Wheeler later joined the hydrogen bomb effort as one of its main civilian advocates.
He taught at Princeton from 1938 to 1976 and supervised 46 doctoral students, more than any other physics professor there. One was Richard Feynman, who doubted Wheeler's playful idea that the universe contains a single electron zigzagging through time, yet borrowed its time-reversal thinking for his famous diagrams.
After the war Wheeler turned to general relativity, which had fallen out of favour in the United States, and revived it almost single-handedly. With Kip Thorne and Charles Misner he wrote the textbook Gravitation. He moved to the University of Texas at Austin in 1976 and died on April 13, 2008.
Source: John Archibald Wheeler
