The (scientific) world mourns the death of John Wheeler

The 96 year old pioneer physicist “popped out of existence” earlier this week in a proverbial quantum foam.

Here an excerpt from sciam.com:

Yesterday morning, renowned physicist John Archibald Wheeler died of pneumonia. He was an iconic figure: a veteran of the Manhattan Project, a pioneer of the search for a quantum theory of gravity, and an originator of such evocative terms as “black hole.” Most physics students know him as co-author of the standard textbook on Einstein’s general theory of relativity—a tome that defies almost every stereotype of a textbook, much as Wheeler’s own career defied almost every generalization. He was rigorous yet playful, and he always had a pithy, Zen-like phrase for profound ideas and questions: “it from bit,” “mass without mass” and “Why the quantum?”. An out-of-the-box thinker who wasn’t afraid to speculate, he always carefully identified speculation as such. In so doing, he opened up space for his colleagues to push the boundaries.

Check out the his full biography here.

Advertisement