{"id":2492,"date":"2008-04-14T07:39:51","date_gmt":"2008-04-14T07:39:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/04\/14\/john-wheeler-rip\/"},"modified":"2008-04-14T07:39:51","modified_gmt":"2008-04-14T07:39:51","slug":"john-wheeler-rip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/04\/14\/john-wheeler-rip\/","title":{"rendered":"John Wheeler, RIP"},"content":{"rendered":"

Going off to a rugby alumni weekend generally requires entering a 48-hour news blackout, at least for me. Of course, the outside world doesn’t stop just because I’m enjoying myself, so I emerge from my fog this morning to find that John Archibald Wheeler passed away. The New York Times<\/cite> obit is here<\/a>, and Daniel Holz at Cosmic Variance offers a personal tribute<\/a>, and I’m sure you’ll see more.<\/p>\n

(This is not, by the way, the first time that a notable public figure has died while I was in Williamstown carousing– the last time, it was Richard Nixon, whose death was offered as a karmic explanation for why one of the guys from the class of ’88 was having Vietnam flashbacks all weekend… I think I liked that one better.)<\/p>\n

Wheeler was a titan of physics, a friend and colleague of Bohr and Einstein, and mentor to Feynman. He worked on the Manhattan Project, coined the term “black hole,” and co-authored the definitive book on gravitation– the famous “Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler,” a whopping huge tome that teeters on the brink of graviational collapse.<\/p>\n

I saw him speak once, at a symposium in honor of Gregory Breit, when I was at Yale (in 1999 or 2000). I wish I could say it was a brilliant talk, but it wasn’t. He was in his late 80’s, and not in great shape, and at one point, he got two pages of his speech out of order, and didn’t notice. Still, as my boss remarked afterwards, there aren’t a lot of people around who can slip in a personal anecdote involving the phrase “So, I said to Bohr, ‘That’ll never work.'”<\/p>\n

And now their number is one smaller.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Going off to a rugby alumni weekend generally requires entering a 48-hour news blackout, at least for me. Of course, the outside world doesn’t stop just because I’m enjoying myself, so I emerge from my fog this morning to find that John Archibald Wheeler passed away. The New York Times obit is here, and Daniel… Continue reading John Wheeler, RIP<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}