AdamSmith Posted June 4, 2018 Posted June 4, 2018 John Archibald Wheeler From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigationJump to search John Archibald Wheeler John Archibald Wheeler before the Hermann Weyl-Conference 1985 in Kiel, Germany Born July 9, 1911Jacksonville, Florida, United States Died April 13, 2008 (aged 96)Hightstown, New Jersey, United States Residence United States Nationality American Alma mater Johns Hopkins University (Ph.D.) Known for Breit–Wheeler process Wheeler–DeWitt equation Popularizing the term "black hole" Nuclear fission Geometrodynamics General relativity Unified field theory Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory Wheeler's delayed choice experiment One-electron universe Geon S-matrix Quantum foam Coining the term "neutron moderator" Coining the term "superspace" Coining the term "wormhole" Lorentzian wormhole "It from bit" Participatory anthropic principle Spouse(s) Janette Hegner Awards Albert Einstein Award (1965) Enrico Fermi Award (1968) Franklin Medal (1969) National Medal of Science (1970) Oersted Medal (1983) J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize (1984) Albert Einstein Medal (1988) Matteucci Medal (1993) Wolf Prize in Physics (1997) Einstein Prize (APS) (2003) Scientific career Fields Physics Institutions University of North Carolina Princeton University University of Texas at Austin Thesis Theory of the dispersion and absorption of helium (1933) Doctoral advisor Karl Herzfeld Doctoral students Jacob Bekenstein Claudio Bunster Demetrios Christodoulou Ignazio Ciufolini Hugh Everett Richard Feynman Kenneth W. Ford Robert Geroch John R. Klauder Bahram Mashhoon Charles Misner Milton Plesset Benjamin Schumacher Kip Thorne Jayme Tiomno Bill Unruh Robert Wald Katharine Way Arthur Wightman John Archibald Wheeler (July 9, 1911 – April 13, 2008) was an American theoretical physicist. He was largely responsible for reviving interest in general relativity in the United States after World War II. Wheeler also worked with Niels Bohr in explaining the basic principles behind nuclear fission. Together with Gregory Breit, Wheeler developed the concept of the Breit–Wheeler process. He is best known for linking the term "black hole" to objects with gravitational collapse already predicted early in the 20th century, for coining the terms "quantum foam", "neutron moderator", "wormhole" and "it from bit", and for hypothesizing the "one-electron universe". Wheeler earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University under the supervision of Karl Herzfeld, and studied under Breit and Bohr on a National Research Council fellowship. In 1939 he teamed up with Bohr to write a series of papers using the liquid drop model to explain the mechanism of fission. During World War II, he worked with the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, where he helped design nuclear reactors, and then at the Hanford Site in Richland, Washington, where he helped DuPont build them. He returned to Princeton after the war ended, but returned to government service to help design and build the hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s. For most of his career, Wheeler was a professor at Princeton University, which he joined in 1938, remaining until his retirement in 1976. At Princeton he supervised 46 PhDs, more than any other professor in the Princeton physics department. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler
Guest Larstrup Posted June 6, 2018 Posted June 6, 2018 19 hours ago, AdamSmith said: Certainly, @RA1 has more than likely had some heroic moments in his time in the cockpit. Why didn’t he get a Letterman appearance? It’s always the unsung heroes in broad daylight which we never hear about.
AdamSmith Posted June 6, 2018 Posted June 6, 2018 On 5/23/2018 at 9:11 PM, Larstrup said: I love him. review submitted. Plus they were twerking way before it became a thing now!
Members RA1 Posted June 6, 2018 Members Posted June 6, 2018 11 hours ago, Larstrup said: Certainly, @RA1 has more than likely had some heroic moments in his time in the cockpit. Why didn’t he get a Letterman appearance? It’s always the unsung heroes in broad daylight which we never hear about. Thanks for the kind thoughts. Personally I am waiting and expect to achieve the Wright Brothers Pilot Award which is given with 50 years of accident and incident free flying. Fingers crossed. Best regards, RA1 AdamSmith 1
AdamSmith Posted June 7, 2018 Posted June 7, 2018 11 hours ago, RA1 said: Thanks for the kind thoughts. Personally I am waiting and expect to achieve the Wright Brothers Pilot Award which is given with 50 years of accident and incident free flying. Fingers crossed. Best regards, RA1 One and one's family visited the site, me age ten, 1969 . Inspiring beyond belief.
AdamSmith Posted June 7, 2018 Posted June 7, 2018 On 5/21/2018 at 8:37 PM, AdamSmith said: ...In 1939, Feynman received a bachelor's degree,[33] and was named a Putnam Fellow.[34] He attained a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams to Princeton University in physics—an unprecedented feat—and an outstanding score in mathematics, but did poorly on the history and English portions. The head of the physics department there, Henry D. Smyth, had another concern, writing to Philip M. Morse to ask: "Is Feynman Jewish? We have no definite rule against Jews but have to keep their proportion in our department reasonably small because of the difficulty of placing them."[35] Morse conceded that Feynman was indeed Jewish, but reassured Smyth that Feynman's "physiognomy and manner, however, show no trace of this characteristic".[35] Attendees at Feynman's first seminar, which was on the classical version of the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory, included Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann. Pauli made the prescient comment that the theory would be extremely difficult to quantize, and Einstein said that one might try to apply this method to gravity in general relativity,[36] which Sir Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar did much later as the Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity.[37][38] Feynman received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1942; his thesis advisor was John Archibald Wheeler.[39] His doctoral thesis was titled "The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics".[40] Feynman had applied the principle of stationary action to problems of quantum mechanics, inspired by a desire to quantize the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics, and laid the groundwork for the path integral formulation and Feynman diagrams.[41] A key insight was that positrons behaved like electrons moving backwards in time.[41] James Gleick wrote: This was Richard Feynman nearing the crest of his powers. At twenty-three ... there may now have been no physicist on earth who could match his exuberant command over the native materials of theoretical science. It was not just a facility at mathematics (though it had become clear ... that the mathematical machinery emerging in the Wheeler–Feynman collaboration was beyond Wheeler's own ability). Feynman seemed to possess a frightening ease with the substance behind the equations, like Einstein at the same age, like the Soviet physicist Lev Landau—but few others.[39] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman Feynman's PhD thesis... https://cds.cern.ch/record/101498/files/Thesis-1942-Feynman.pdf
AdamSmith Posted June 9, 2018 Posted June 9, 2018 My undergraduate senior-thesis advisor. Yet, alas, another loss. Here, in my late 50s, of my then-heroes. He was nothing but supportive & encouraging of my undergraduate intellectual enthusiasms. Of my wildest ideas. Knowing he is now gone from the scene... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/obituaries/jd-mcclatchy-poet-of-the-body-in-sickness-and-health-dies-at-72.html
AdamSmith Posted June 17, 2018 Posted June 17, 2018 One of the strains of thought & feeling, deeply buried in the strata of American spiritual & intellectual being, that will I am convinced fairly soon rise from the collective conscience to save us from the present moment... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiezer_Coppe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_anarchism MsAnn 1
