John Archibald Wheeler
John Archibald Wheeler was born in Jacksonville, Florida, on the 9th of July 1911. He grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, but spent a year from 1921 to 1922 on a farm in Benson, Vermont. During that single year, he attended a one-room schoolhouse. This rural experience stood in contrast to his later life as a theoretical physicist at Princeton University. After returning to Youngstown, he attended Rayen High School before graduating from Baltimore City College in 1926. He entered Johns Hopkins University with a scholarship from the state of Maryland. At age 21, Wheeler earned his doctorate under Karl Herzfeld. His dissertation focused on the Theory of the Dispersion and Absorption of Helium. He published his first scientific paper in 1930 while working a summer job at the National Bureau of Standards.
Wheeler joined the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago in January 1942. He moved there to work with Eugene Wigner's group on nuclear reactor design. The Army Corps of Engineers gave DuPont responsibility for building reactors at the Hanford Site in Washington. Wheeler relocated his family to Wilmington, Delaware, in March 1943. They moved again to Richland, Washington, in July 1944. While working on the B Reactor, he predicted that iodine-135 would act as a neutron poison. The reactor unexpectedly shut down after only 15 hours of operation. This crisis was caused by xenon-135, which has a half-life of 9.2 hours. A personal tragedy shadowed these technical achievements. His brother Joe sent a postcard from Italy with the message Hurry up. Joe was killed in October 1944 before the war ended. Wheeler later wrote that they were so close to creating a weapon to end the war when his brother died.
In August 1945, Wheeler and his family returned to Princeton University. Henry D. Smyth asked him to join the effort to develop the hydrogen bomb. Wheeler agreed to go to Los Alamos after a conversation with Niels Bohr. He set up Project Matterhorn at Princeton in 1951. This project had two parts: Matterhorn S for stellarator research and Matterhorn B for weapons work. Senior scientists remained uninterested, so Wheeler staffed it with young graduate students. The branch office achieved success during the Ivy Mike nuclear test on the 1st of November 1952. The yield of the Sausage device was about 30 percent higher than Matterhorn B had estimated. In January 1953, Wheeler lost a classified paper on lithium-6 during an overnight train trip. This resulted in an official reprimand. Matterhorn B was discontinued, but Matterhorn S endured as the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
During the 1950s, Wheeler formulated geometrodynamics. He envisaged the fabric of the universe as a chaotic subatomic realm called quantum foam. While working on mathematical extensions to Einstein's general relativity in 1957, he introduced the concept of wormholes. These were hypothetical tunnels in space-time that Bohr asked him to investigate. Wheeler determined they were not stable. He used the term black hole in 1967 during a talk at the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies. A member of the audience suggested the phrase because Wheeler kept saying gravitationally completely collapsed object. Stephen Hawking later described Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt's work as the equation governing the wave function of the Universe. Wheeler also developed the theory of gravitational collapse alongside his student Richard Feynman. Their collaboration led to the Tiomno Triangle, which related different forms of radioactive decay.
In 1940, Wheeler conceived his one-electron universe postulate. He proposed that there was only one electron bouncing back and forth in time. His graduate student Richard Feynman found this hard to believe initially. Feynman incorporated the notion of the reversibility of time into his Feynman diagrams. Wheeler later coined the term quantum foam to describe fluctuations at the smallest scale. In 1990, he suggested that physics is binary at the smallest scale. The amount of information needed to describe the universe is limited to binary choices. This idea became known as it from bit. All things physical are information-theoretic in origin according to this concept. Wheeler also proposed delayed-choice experiments in 1978 and 1984. These thought experiments sought to discover whether light senses the experimental apparatus it travels through.
Wheeler remained a member of the Princeton faculty until 1976. At Princeton, he supervised 46 PhD students, more than any other physics professor. Two of these students won Nobel Prizes: Richard Feynman and Kip Thorne. Other notable graduates included Jacob Bekenstein, Hugh Everett, and Charles Misner. Wheeler placed a high priority on teaching freshman and sophomore physics. He wrote a supportive review article to help Hugh Everett's work. He met with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen seeking approval for Everett's approach. Wheeler left Princeton at age 65 to become director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Texas at Austin. He held that position until 1986 when he retired. On the 13th of April 2008, Wheeler died of pneumonia at the age of 96 in Hightstown, New Jersey.
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Common questions
When and where was John Archibald Wheeler born?
John Archibald Wheeler was born in Jacksonville, Florida on the 9th of July 1911. He later grew up in Youngstown, Ohio before attending a one-room schoolhouse in Benson, Vermont from 1921 to 1922.
What role did John Archibald Wheeler play during the Manhattan Project?
John Archibald Wheeler joined the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago in January 1942 to work with Eugene Wigner's group on nuclear reactor design. He relocated his family to Richland, Washington in July 1944 while working on the B Reactor at the Hanford Site.
How did John Archibald Wheeler coin the term black hole?
John Archibald Wheeler used the term black hole in 1967 during a talk at the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies. A member of the audience suggested the phrase because Wheeler kept saying gravitationally completely collapsed object.
Who were the notable students supervised by John Archibald Wheeler?
John Archibald Wheeler supervised 46 PhD students including Richard Feynman and Kip Thorne who both won Nobel Prizes. Other notable graduates included Jacob Bekenstein, Hugh Everett, and Charles Misner.
When and where did John Archibald Wheeler die?
John Archibald Wheeler died of pneumonia on the 13th of April 2008 in Hightstown, New Jersey. He was 96 years old when he passed away after retiring from the University of Texas at Austin in 1986.