Trombone player who is also a member for the New York band East 4th Horns.
The Wheelers often spent summers on High Island in Maine. His wife, Janette Wheeler, bought their summer home in Johns absence and was apprehensive about his reaction to it until, on his first day there, he placed a chair on the front lawn and sat looking at the view for the entire afternoon.
Wheeler argued that sentient life exists nowhere in the universe except on Earth; that if the universe were not a "participatory universe" - one whose reality depends on our cooperation in observing it - it would have only the palest sort of reality.
Wheeler and Richard Feynman once constructed a diagram so complicated that they were tempted to label it: "For figure caption, see text," thus making the entire article a caption for one figure!
Richard Feynman once said affectionately, "Some people think Wheelers gotten crazy in his later years, but hes always been crazy."
Dr. Max Tegmark , a cosmologist at the University of Pennsylvania, says of Wheeler: "He brought the fun back into physics".
Professor emeritus of Princeton University in New Jersey.
The oldest child in a family of librarians, Wheeler became interested in science as a boy reading scientific articles.
Wheeler confirmed that a giant star with a mass greater than that of twice our Sun will implode when it dies. The resulting implosion is unable to create a white dwarf, a neutron star, or any other sort of dead, cold star unless it emits enough of its mass to go below the critical mass limit of twice our Sun.
As a young physicist, Wheeler got involved in the problem of nuclear fission, and later in the Manhattan Project. After working at Chicago, Wheeler began to collaborate with Du Pont engineers in the plutonium production project.
Coined the term "black hole" for the astronomical object also known as a collapsed star, either in 1967 at a conference in New York City, in a 1968 lecture to the American Astronomical Society, or in 1969, depending where you research. It is said that his former student, Richard Feynman , objected against this terminology because he thought it was "obscene."
Physicist, leader of the U.S. team that sought to create the first hydrogen bomb. He also originated a novel approach to the unified field theory.
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 threw new lights on many problems, such as Machs principle, the evolution of 3-geometries, worm holes, and quantum foam.
Wheeler was superb at explaining hard ideas in a simple language. His textbooks on relativity include Spacetime Physics (with Edwin Taylor, 1963 and 1992), Gravitation (with Charles W. Misner and Kip Thorne , 1973), Exploring Black Holes (with Taylor, 2000), and A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime.
