John Wheeler, RIP

Going off to a rugby alumni weekend generally requires entering a 48-hour news blackout, at least for me. Of course, the outside world doesn't stop just because I'm enjoying myself, so I emerge from my fog this morning to find that John Archibald Wheeler passed away. The New York Times obit is here, and Daniel Holz at Cosmic Variance offers a personal tribute, and I'm sure you'll see more.

(This is not, by the way, the first time that a notable public figure has died while I was in Williamstown carousing-- the last time, it was Richard Nixon, whose death was offered as a karmic explanation for why one of the guys from the class of '88 was having Vietnam flashbacks all weekend... I think I liked that one better.)

Wheeler was a titan of physics, a friend and colleague of Bohr and Einstein, and mentor to Feynman. He worked on the Manhattan Project, coined the term "black hole," and co-authored the definitive book on gravitation-- the famous "Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler," a whopping huge tome that teeters on the brink of graviational collapse.

I saw him speak once, at a symposium in honor of Gregory Breit, when I was at Yale (in 1999 or 2000). I wish I could say it was a brilliant talk, but it wasn't. He was in his late 80's, and not in great shape, and at one point, he got two pages of his speech out of order, and didn't notice. Still, as my boss remarked afterwards, there aren't a lot of people around who can slip in a personal anecdote involving the phrase "So, I said to Bohr, 'That'll never work.'"

And now their number is one smaller.

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Misner Thorne and Wheeler is a beautiful book. It simultaneously made me appreciate GR for being a wonderful theory and convince me that I was nowhere near smart enough to actually cut it as a theorist.

By Brad Holden (not verified) on 14 Apr 2008 #permalink

And Bohr and Wheeler (the paper providing a dynamical model for nuclear fission, included in the "century of Physical Review" compilation) is a magnificent example of a theoretical model. [It is a model built from theory and good guesses, not from an assemblage of inferences drawn from data.] It predicted U-235 fissions.

Process the fact that the same person is responsible for this paper and that tome on GR, and did his PhD work in a third area, and you can begin to get an idea of how great he was.

Did any of you youngsters ever hear of his "first moral principle", which was that you should never compute something (numerically) unless you already know the answer (order of magnitude) from basic physical reasoning? I don't know if it can actually be attributed to him, but it fits.

By CCPhysicist (not verified) on 14 Apr 2008 #permalink

One of my current professors (also probably in his 80s) regularly gets his lecture notes out of order and doesn't notice.

The New York Times obituary was a source among many for composing the poem that I wrote about Wheeler, and posted at Cosmic Variance (comment #63).

I gave a hardcopy to Kip Thorne at Caltech yesterday, when I extended my condolences, as Kip was directly a student and long-time friend of Wheeler, and it was the GR bible (GRAVITATION by Thorne, Misner, Wheeler) that I studied from at Caltech when it was still in spiral-bound pre-print.

The more one knows about Wheeler, the more biographical details you can find embedded in the poem, such as Matterhorn being the H-bomb project that followed the Manhattan Project.

The poem uses the unusual rhyme scheme ABCCBA in each sestain, to indicate Symmetry. But the symmetry is deliberately broken, to also give them poem a prime number of lines. The many quotes from Wheeler embedded explicitly in the poem are amazingly poetic in and of themselves.
Other quotes of his I have, in the past, used to build whole poems, one per quote, such as his: "Space tells mass how to move" while "mass tells space how to curve."