John A. Wheeler, 1911-2008

April 14, 2008 on 10:44 pm | In Science News & Hot Topics |

Physicist John Archibald Wheeler, who studied under Niels Bohr and later taught Richard Feynman and Hugh Everett, who worked on the Manhattan Project and adopted the term “black hole” (over ‘com­pletely collapsed gravitational objects’), passed away on Sunday at the age of 96.

Obituaries and tributes from:

• New York Times
• Princeton University
• Physics Today
• Scientific American
• On the Cosmic Variance blog, a personal tribute from one of his students

Selected Works:

• The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission (w/ N Bohr). Phys. Rev. 56, 426 - 450 (1939)
• Nuclear Constitution and the Interpretation of Fission Phenomena (w/ DL Hill). Phys. Rev. 89, 1102 - 1145 (1953)
• Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics (1998)
• Spacetime Physics: Introduction to Special Relativity (1992)