John Archibald Wheeler | Biography

John Archibald Wheeler's work with Niels Bohr and Edward Teller helped advance the processes of nuclear fission and fusion. Wheeler conducted a variety of military research in association with the Manhattan Project, the effort which developed the atomic bomb during World War II, and also was instrumental in the creation of the hydrogen bomb. A professor of physics and director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Texas at Austin, Wheeler added the term "black hole" to astronomy dictionaries. Throughout his career, Wheeler has made fundamental contributions to the studies of nuclear structure, nuclear fission, scattering theory, relativity, geometrodynamics, and other subjects. A long-time professor at Princeton University, his students include the Nobel-honored physicist Richard P. Feynman. Wheeler was born in Jacksonville, Florida, on July 9, 1911. His parents, Dr. Joseph Lewis Wheeler and Mabel Archibald Wheeler, were both librarians. Dr. Wheeler was later head of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland, when his son entered Johns Hopkins University as an undergraduate. Wheeler's plans to major in electrical engineering changed after his first year, according to Dennis Overbye's essay on Wheeler in A Passion To Know, because of "a frustrating summer spent rewinding electrical motors in a silver mine in New Mexico." Wheeler then changed his major to theoretical physics, a field in which he earned his Ph.D. in 1933.

A postdoctoral fellowship from the National Research Council in 1933 allowed Wheeler to continue his studies first at New York University with Gregory Breit and then at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. There, he worked closely with Bohr; Wheeler would later tell Overbye that "you can talk about people like Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Confucius, but the thing that really convinced me that such people existed were the conversations with Bohr."

While studying with Bohr, Wheeler began to think about one of the questions that was to occupy his attention for many years: the structure of the atomic nucleus. At the time, two models of the nucleus were popular, one which emphasized the properties of the nucleus as a whole and one that emphasized the properties of the nucleons (protons and neutrons) that make up the nucleus. More than a decade later, in 1953, Wheeler and a colleague, D. L. Hill, made one of the first and most successful attempts to combine these two models into a single theory, the "collective model" of the atomic nucleus. Wheeler, in collaboration with Bohr, also devised a theory explaining the process of nuclear fission, predicting the fissility of plutonium produced from the uranium isotope 238 U. The Wheeler-Bohr discovery was later to become critical in the development of the first atomic weapons.

Throughout his career, Wheeler has pursued some of the most difficult and most fundamental questions in all of physics. Some of his earlier research dealt with the search for a unified field theory, which would show how the fundamental forces of nature (the strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational forces) are related to each other. His 1962 book, Geometrodynamics, is a collection of his papers on this subject. He also worked during the 1940s with Feynman on the problem of action at a distance, a line of research for which Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics.

During World War II, Wheeler took a leave of absence from Princeton to consult on various aspects of the Manhattan Project, working at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory, where the first atomic pile was constructed; at Washington States' Hanford Engineering Works, where plutonium was manufactured; and at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, where the first atomic bombs were assembled and tested. Wheeler maintained scientific affiliations with the government, serving as a member of the U.S. General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament from 1969 to 1976, science advisor to the U.S. Senate Delegation to the 1957 NATO Conference of Parliamentarians, project chairman of the Department of Defense Advance Research Project Agency in 1958, and consultant to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1958. Wheeler received the Albert Einstein Award of the Strauss Foundation in 1965 for his contributions in the field of nuclear energy.

One of Wheeler's best known and most controversial activities was his participation in the design and construction of the first thermonuclear fusion (hydrogen) bomb. Invited by Teller in 1949 to assist in this project, Wheeler was at first hesitant to become involved, but eventually became convinced that such a weapon was necessary to preserve worldwide peace. Wheeler's part in the project took place primarily between 1951 and 1953 at his Princeton offices under the code name Project Matterhorn.

In 1939, J. Robert Oppenheimer described the theoretical effects of the curvature of space, when thermonuclear reactions cease to function in stars and gravitational forces cause their collapse. Wheeler carried out his own investigations into this phenomenon and, in 1967, coined the term "black hole." Expanding upon this concept even further, he rationalized that the whole universe might be subject to what he called the big crunch. As the universe contracts upon itself to super-dense dimensions, it would cause an explosion similar to that of the big bang, creating a totally new universe. As part of this research, Wheeler has developed the concept of "superspace," a highly complex mathematical construct that may be all that remains of the universe after the Big Crunch. His ideas on the big crunch and superspace have continued to evolve over time, resulting in the better understanding of black holes and imaginative theoretical constructs such as "wormholes," which deal with holes in space containing electrical forces.

Wheeler was married to Janette Latourette Zabriskie Hegner in 1935, "three days after [his] return from Copenhagen," according to Overbye. The couple has three children, one son and two daughters. Upon his return, Wheeler accepted a job as assistant professor of physics at the University of North Carolina. He remained there three years before taking a similar post at Princeton University, an affiliation that lasted until 1976. Wheeler took early retirement in order to accept an appointment at the University of Texas at Austin, as professor of physics and director of the Center for Theoretical Physics and then, in 1979, as Ashbell Smith Professor of Physics. He has also retained his Princeton rank of Joseph Henry Professor Emeritus.

Wheeler has received a host of honors and awards, including the Cressey-Morrison Prize of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1946, the Enrico Fermi Award of the U.S. Energy Research and Development Agency, 1968, the Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute, 1969, the National Medal of Science, 1971, the Niels Bohr International Gold Medal, 1982, the Oersted Medal, 1983, and the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize, 1984.