John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008)
One of the leading figures in the development of general relativity and quantum gravity, as well as one of the best teachers among the American physicists.
Wheeler's autobiography, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam (1998) begins with the story of Bohr's "disclosure" of the news of nuclear fission, on his arrival in the United States, January 1939. Actually, Wheeler tells us that it was Bohr's young associate Rosenfeld and Wheeler himself that arranged the meeting for that "disclosure" for American physicists. Thus as a young physicist, Wheeler got involved in the problem of nuclear fission, and later in the Manhattan Project. After working a while at Chicago, Wheeler began to collaborate with Du Pont engineers in the plutonium production project; and he eventually went to Hanford, Washington. (See Nuclear physics.)
After the war, he was again involved in the project of H-bomb (1949-1952); and released from such national duties, he "fell in love with general relativity and gravitation in 1952" (op. cit., 52). According to his own words,
It was actually nuclear physics and quantum theory that drew me into relativity. In January 1952, I had taken some time to study two classic 1939 papers, one by Robert Oppenheimer and George Volkoff, the other by Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder. Both were concerned with gravitational collapse, the predicted fate of a massive star after its thermonuclear fuel was burned up. (op. cit., 228)Since Wheeler was troubled by the idea of a singularity, he took a stance against Oppenheimer's view, even in the field of physics (recall Oppenheimer was against the H-bomb, and had a bitter experience with Edward Teller, the major advocate of the H-bomb and a good friend of Wheeler's). However, after ten years of resistance, Wheeler eventually embraced gravitational collapse, and even coined the word "black hole"; later, Wheeler came up with the phrase "a black hole has no hair", and it is said that the former student Feynman objected against this terminology by saying that it is "obscene" (297). However, when Wheeler came to the view in conformity with Oppenheimer's, Oppenheimer was not interested in the subject any more, as Kip Thorne tells us (Black Holes and Time Warps, 240; for their scientific confrontation, see 209-211).
Such episodes aside, it is well known that Wheeler revived interests in general relativity, and contributed to its development by raising many students (at Princeton and Texas) and publishing many important ideas. It must be emphrasized that Wheeler is very good at explaining hard ideas in a simple language, and his textbooks on relativity, as well as popular expositions of relativity are quite valuable; see, e.g., Spacetime Physics (with Edwin Taylor, 1963 and 1992), Gravitation (with Misner and Thorne, 1973), Exploring Black Holes (with Taylor, 2000), and A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime (1999). Of course, he has been one of the leading figures in the relativistic research and the quantum gravity, and he threw new lights on many problems, such as Mach's principle, the evolution of 3-geometries, worm holes, and quantum foam.
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