John Archibald Wheeler
| John Archibald Wheeler was a physicist and philosopher, professor at Princeton University and University of Texas, used an agent of the Science Church to play a role in quantum mechanics, the British and American nuclear projects Tube Alloys and Manhattan Project and to promote Einstein's Theory of Relativity and to popularize the terms 'black hole' and 'wormhole' (dimensional portal). He was educated at Johns Hopkins University under Karl Herzfeld (lecturer at Fordham of the jesuits) and at NYU under Gregory Breit (Manhattan Project). He was a member of the American Philosophical Society. |  |
At Princeton he was a classmate of Terry Sejnowski (CIA, invented the Boltzmann machine with Geoffrey Hinton, Salk Institute of Biology, teacher of Stanford professor David Eagleman).
In 1931 he described the process of a positron-electron pair created from the collision of two photons with Gregory Breit as the Breit-Wheeler process.
In 1939 he published a paper on nuclear fission with Niels Bohr (Manhattan Project) and proposed experimenting with uranium (engineered by Manson Benedict in Project Manhattan).
Bohr's student Werner Heisenberg elaborated on Wheeler's concept of an S (scattering) -matrix.
From 1942 he worked at the Metallurgic Laboratory of University of Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project, with Arthur Compton, Eugene Wigner, Glenn Seaborg (all 3 awarded with Nobel Prize) and the Duponts.
At Princeton he was the teacher of Richard Feynman, Hugh Everrett (many worlds theory), Kip Thorne (Christopher Nolan's Interstellar with Nathan Crowley), Katharine Way, Jacob Bekenstein, Ken Ford, John Toll,..
In 1958 he co-founded advisory group JASON (argonauts symbolism, DARPA, MITRE Corporation) with Murray Gell-Man, Marshall Rosenbluth, Leon Lederman, Sidney Drell (Israel Democracy Institute), Freeman Dyson, Steven Weinberg, Hans Bethe, Luis Walter Alvarez, Lewis Branscomb (IBM), Donald Glaser (Brookhaven National Laboratory), Joshua Lederberg (Rockefeller University), Gerald Joyce (Salk Institute),..
born 7/9/1911.
died 4/13/2008.
Works
1962 Geometrodynamics
1965 Gravitation Theory and Gravitational Collapse with Kip Thorne University of Chicago
1973 Gravitation
1979 Some Men and Moments in the History of Nuclear Physics
1987 Cosmology, Physics and Philosophy
1990 A Journey Into Gravity and Spacetime
1992 Spacetime Physics
1998 Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam