John Wheeler, RIP
If you don’t know who John Wheeler is, you should.
He worked on the Manhattan Project, to create the atomic bomb.
He coined the term “black hole” to describe the gravitation collapse of a dead star into a singularity, and the term “worm hole” to describe how matter might escape a black hole and reappear elsewhere in the same universe. (“Worm hole” has taken on a lot more connotations since he first described it.)
Wheeler’s grad students included Richard Feynman (who was perhaps the greatest lecturer in physics of all time) and Kip Thorne (not the gay actor), who first described in non-fictional terms how a time machine could work, and Hugh Everett, who came up with a unique and non-contradictory solution to the quantum paradox of the multi-verse, that anytime there is a choice the universe splits, so that all things that could happen do happen, in one universe or another.
John Wheeler wrote a book in 1973 titled “Gravitation” that to this day is still the definitive work describing Einsteinian Gravitation (relativistic gravity).
John Wheeler was in the thick of things when quantum theory was being developed. He is probably the most famous and influential physicist of the 20th century who did not win the Nobel Prize.
In my humble opinion, he carried one thing too far, and that his argument for the “strong anthropic principle”, which planted the idea that the human mind, by its observation of the universe brought the universe itself into being, that “Observers are necessary to bring the Universe into being”, which is another solution to the quantum paradox, and nature, of why physical laws are as they are are not something even slightly different.
John Wheeler wrote a book called “The Theory of Everything” which, while being a bestseller, was a let down and really, to me showed that he was just trying to cash in on his career. The book broke no new ground, and was basically a complex physics for the layman masses kind of book.
Nevertheless, John A. Wheeler, was a top-notch thinker, who has had much influence on the technological world we now live in. Anthropically speaking, the World would not be the same without him. Today the World is a better place because of him and a lessor place without him.
There are few men I would mourn for. John Wheeler is one of those few. While I have never met him, his work has played a significant role in the development of my own intellect. He was extraordinary, and I will miss him.