The Last Superhero: 1911-2008

Dennis Overbye, writing in The New York Times has a nice obituary story of John Archibald Wheeler, dead at 96. Wheeler's career began in the heroic age of physics, when he worked with Neils Bohr on the liquid drop model of the nucleus, and he and his students helped transform the study of general relativity. Richard Feynman was perhaps his most famous student, but many others made their mark on physics.

Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of Dr. Wheeler, “For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.”...

Among Dr. Wheeler’s students was Richard Feynman of the California Institute of Technology, who parlayed a crazy-sounding suggestion by Dr. Wheeler into work that led to a Nobel Prize. Another was Hugh Everett, whose Ph.D. thesis under Dr. Wheeler on quantum mechanics envisioned parallel alternate universes endlessly branching and splitting apart — a notion that Dr. Wheeler called “Many Worlds” and which has become a favorite of many cosmologists as well as science fiction writers.

Recalling his student days, Dr. Feynman once said, “Some people think Wheeler’s gotten crazy in his later years, but he’s always been crazy.”


Two of my favorite stories about Wheeler aren't mentioned by Overbye:

In Chance and Chaos David Ruelle says that students in his generation came to physics either through radio building or chemistry experiments. He mentioned this theory to Wheeler and his wife, and asked which route he had followed. Wheeler's wife said "Both," and held up Wheeler's hand to exhibit a finger missing as a result of an early experiment in the chemistry of explosives.

When Feynman presented the classical version of advanced plus retarded potentials approach to the self energy of the electron, Pauli was in the audience (along with Einstein and a whole host of other luminaries). Afterward, Pauli asked Feynman about the quantum theory, and Feynman said that Wheeler was working it out. Pauli replied: "So the graduate student does the classical theory and the professor does the quantum. Let me tell you a secret: the professor will never produce that quantum theory."

Of course he didn't.

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