John Archibald Wheeler was born on July 19, 1911, in Jacksonville, Florida to parents who were both librarians. He was the oldest of four children, two brothers who would eventually earn Ph.D. degrees, and a sister who would became a librarian. John’s early readings of science articles ignited his interest in that subject and when he graduated from Baltimore City College high school in 1926, he was awarded a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University.
After earning his Ph.D. on “The Theory of the Dispersion and Absorption of Helium,” in 1933, he received an NRC fellowship that brought him to New York University where he co-published with Gregory Breit a paper proposing a mechanism for converting photons into matter in the form of electron-positron pairs. The following year John went to Copenhagen, where he worked under the leadership of Neils Bohr.
In 1937, John Archibald Wheeler was appointed Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During that time he published On the Mathematical Description of Light Nuclei by the Method of Resonating Group Structure in which he introduced the S-matrix that became a valuable mathematical construct in elementary particle physics. The following year, he accepted an offer for an assistant professorship at Princeton where he collaborated with Neils Bohr in the publication of two papers on nuclear fission.
Shortly after America’s entry into World War II, Wheeler received an invitation from Arthur Compton to join the Manhattan Project dedicated to the creation of an atomic bomb. Together with Robert Christy he wrote a paper on the purification of plutonium that would be useful in the design of a plutonium bomb. While working on this project, John received a postcard from his brother, Joe, who was fighting in Italy, urging him to “hurry up” with the creation of a bomb to end the war. Ironically, Joe was killed in October 1944, leaving a widow and baby daughter behind.
In his later years, Wheeler shifted his focus from quantum physics to the study of Einstein’s unified field theory. In collaboration with Bryce DeWitt, he developed the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, that attempts to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics by describing the quantum state of the entire universe. Wheeler conducted extensive research on the nature of regions in spacetime possessing near infinite gravitation and coined the term “black hole” to describe these enigmatic entities. In 1965, he published Gravitation Theory and Gravitational Collapse, in 1968, Einstein’s Vision, in 1979, Frontiers of Time, and in 1995, Gravitation and Inertia. He culminated these publications in 1998, with his autobiography, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics. On April 13, 2008, ten years after the publication of his autobiography, John Archibald Wheeler at the age of 96, died of pneumonia in Hightstown, New Jersey.
John Archibald Wheeler made important contributions to the understanding of nuclear processes, including the theory of nuclear scattering and the mechanisms behind nuclear reactions. Influenced by Neils Bohr, he became a proponent of the idea that observers play a fundamental role in the formation of the universe, an idea with links to the anthropic principle in cosmology. Wheeler introduced the concept of “geons,” hypothetical gravitational wave packets held together in a confined region by their own gravity, contributing to the understanding of the fabric of spacetime. He was also an influential teacher and mentor, guiding many students who would go on to make their own significant contributions to physics. His work left a lasting legacy on the fields of theoretical physics and cosmology.
