|
John Wheeler died on 13 April, aged 96. He was the first to coin the term 'black hole', helped develop the theory of nuclear fission and one of the great physicists to participate in the Manhattan project, the first program to create a working nuclear weapon during World War II. John Wheeler was born in Jacksonville, Florida on 9 July 1911. At the age of 16, he went to Johns Hopkins University,
where he studied physics, although he originally wanted to study engineering.
In 1933, Wheeler graduated John Hopkins University with a PhD study into the properties of the helium atom, after which he went to Denmark, to study quantum mechanics along with Niels Bohr, with whom he also collaborated into a paper related to the theory of nuclear fission, including the 'liquid drop' model.
In 1943, Wheeler was chosen to participate in the Manhattan project at Los Alamos, after parting with his academic career at Princeton University in 1938. After World War II, he returned to Princeton, where he remained until his retirement in 1976. During the time spent at Princeton University, Wheeler was a supervisor to great physicists such as Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne and Hugh Everett.
He became the first to coin the term 'black hole' in 1967, the object created when a sufficiently massive star can no longer remain stable and collapses under its own weight. Black holes would have escaped velocities greater than that of light, so electromagnetic radiation cannot escape the gravitational pull of a black hole. Although specialized in quantum mechanics, Wheeler was never really comfortable with the idea that an object of infinite mass and density, but with no volume - singularity - exists in the center of a black hole.
Wheeler is also known as a pioneer into quantum gravity, due to his work with Bryce deWitt, with whom he developed the 'Wheeler-deWitt' equation. After retirement from the academic activity at Princeton in 1976, John Wheeler moved to the University of Texas, and in 1998 he published an autobiographic book along with Kenneth Ford, called 'Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics'.
|
No user comments yet.
Be the first to express your opinion using the form below!
