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Physicist John A. Wheeler is Dead at 96
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Apr 14, 2008 02:07 PM
from the big-wormhole-in-the-sky dept.
from the big-wormhole-in-the-sky dept.
reverseengineer writes "Eminent physicist John Archibald Wheeler has died from pneumonia at the age of 96. The coiner of the terms 'black hole' and 'wormhole,' Wheeler popularized the study of general relativity, and advised a distinguished list of graduate students including Kip Thorne and Richard Feynman. Other work included a collaboration with Niels Bohr to develop the 'liquid drop' model of nuclear fission. Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of Dr. Wheeler, 'For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.'"
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What about Hawking? (Score:2, Insightful)
What -- has Steven Hawking retired, or died?
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Re:What about Hawking? (Score:5, Funny)
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Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist (Score:5, Interesting)
Secondly while Hawking has made several important discoveries, he was cited by my college physics professor to be a 'pop' physicist. Hawking is a genius but mostly in theoretical physics. My professor also degraded Brian Greene to a much further point by saying he was nothing more than someone relaying physics to the general public. I also got into an argument about Sagan but I had an even harder time defending Sagan than Hawking.
While I've read books about the nature of space-time by Hawking, I noticed they were often co-written with Roger Penrose. In fact, if I were to ask you the most famous work of Hawking [wikipedia.org], what would you say? Probably A Brief History of Time.
What might follow is arguments of who is more important, the man who discovers this science or the man who makes it easily accessible and digestible by a vast majority of the five billion simpletons living on the earth?
Perhaps it can be said that Hawking is more than a pop-physicist but I'm aware of criticisms that he's mostly a public figure with a very romantic story behind him--condemned to a chair he took to books and became a brilliant scientist! I read his works and love him but I'm not a physicist so maybe that's why?
At any rate, whenever anyone dies a lot more respect is delivered unto them. Although I don't remember people saying much about Paul Erdos, I was shocked when people recognized Stanislaw Lem's death on such a large scale. It's a sad fact of our society, your work is commonly overlooked until you're dead.
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Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist (Score:5, Funny)
Was your college physics professor perhaps a rather bitter man whose own book had failed to sell terribly well?
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Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist (Score:5, Insightful)
You know you're on Slashdot when someone speaks so condescendingly of most of humanity for their lack of PhD-level expertise in a specific field and gets modded interesting. I challenge you to take a few good cultural anthropology classes. Just a few. The human experience does not begin or end in a physics lab.
Here a great man has passed in a great field, and we mar that with misanthropy.
Parent
You (And Several Others) Misunderstand (Score:3, Interesting)
You know you're on Slashdot when someone speaks so condescendingly of most of humanity for their lack of PhD-level expertise in a specific field and gets modded interesting. I challenge you to take a few good cultural anthropology classes. Just a few. The human experience does not begin or end in a physics lab.
You misunderstand me. By stating that I read these pop physicist books, I was implying that I'm one of those five billion simpletons. I am simple, especially compared to any physicist or my college professor even. I was not great at physics which is why I code computers for a living now.
I've taken cultural anthropology classes--even while in college! I still read many books about Native American/First Nation, Inuit, Inca, Pima, Hopi, Aztec and League of Five Nations peoples. I love their culture!
Re:Pop Physicist Versus Real Physicist (Score:4, Insightful)
By such a strict classification system, there are only two dozen physicists on Earth... and the thousands of professors in the physics departments of the world are then only 'pop' physicists?
Hawking may be more well-known for his popularization than for his fundamental contributions, but his work in both areas is significant. He's a real scientist who understands physics at a deep level, and calling him a 'pop' physicist is unfair.
(Note: There certainly are some professors who make little to no impact on research, and who are only good at popularizing science. Those are the 'pop' scientists, in my opinion.)
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Sagan is a somewhat different kettle of fish. He was a
Pop Physicist? (Score:3, Insightful)
Honestly, to say that about a man holding the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics position in Cambridge is a little bit rich.
Hawking (working with Penrose, what is wrong with that? He can defend himslef if he thinks he is not receiving the credit he deserves) has hinted to some of the most insightful findings about the nature of the universe (he is the person closest so far to demonstrate that god does not exist. If that is pop physics, well, I am Mickey Mo
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Regardless what the objective answer to that turns out to be, elitism isn't healthy. Those 5E9 simpletons -- or at least the ones in the US, Europe, and Russia -- are the ones who pay for all the expensive research toys like the LHC. I think the most important role of a Hawking or a Sagan i
Dyson, Gell-Man (Score:5, Insightful)
Hawking... I don't know. I can't deny he's been a good interface between the field and its popular discussion, or that he's been a good cosmologist, but it's hard for me to see him in the same way these figures who basically invented large swaths of modern physics.
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Re:Dyson, Gell-Man (Score:4, Insightful)
But as to the underlying notion that somehow there was this era of supermen of physics, I suppose it's true to a point, but even the greats were standing on the shoulders of giants. The chief difference, I suspect, is that during the late 19th and into the first half of the 20th century there was a considerable amount of public appetite for science. Men like Einstein were idiosyncratic demi-gods in many peoples' eyes. There was a drama to it all, and scientists were seen as almost epic figures, unlocking the secrets of the universe and ushering in a new age of reason and enlightenment. World War 2 and the rise of atomic weapons ended that, and in particular, the Cold War encouraged much more practical science, while theoretical physics to some degree slipped into the shadows, with about the only time it ever really gained any attention being Hawking and Penrose's work and String Theory.
There is no lack of exciting research today, and we certainly have some great scientists, but the general attitude of the public to science seems to be a combination of apathy and mistrust. As well, physics is currently in a bit of a consolidation period, not so much revolution as evolution as the stunning discoveries of the last hundred years percolate and the much harder, and much more thankless work of trying to sort out just what all these giants had discovered means. The biggest problem is the unification of GR and Quantum Mechanics, and I think once we get that, we'll probably see a new era of giants as the full implications of that union once again revolutionizes our view of the universe.
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Google Wheeling & INFORMATION THEORY (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What about Hawking? (Score:5, Funny)
That's OK as long as he stays clear from Redmont.
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You might want to look at his publishing record (Score:5, Informative)
While Hawking has acheived fame for his popular science books, he has contributed immensely to the current state of physics thinking. The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time [amazon.com] , co-authored with G.F.R Ellis (Cambridge University Press, 1973) is vastly influential.
I don't get this tendency for people to think that if someone produces popular science books, they must be an intellectual lightweight who can't make real contributions to the field.
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Re:You might want to look at his publishing record (Score:4, Insightful)
I, on the contrary think that it is _those_ scientists who can communicate science to the general population the ones who really are worth their salt. Because they are the ones who *really* understand the subject they are describing and who also are able to transfer such knowledge to other people.
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Re:I think it is all "relative" (Score:5, Funny)
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Sad day (Score:4, Funny)
RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
A great man has died, RIP.
My condolences top his next of kin.
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It wasn't a statement claiming to speak an absolute truth, but a personal judgement clearly marked as such.
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Yes, absolutely! Why submit an article about the sad death of a great man and then completely trivialize it with a cheap shot at Hawking. Knowing full well that all you'll do is make the comments about Hawking. Cheap and disrespectful. Let's try and make this about Wheeler and
That is sad (Score:2)
The Institute for Advanced Study had many 'legends' like Kurt GÃdel, Einstein, John von Neumann, etc.
Went to high school with two of his grandkids (Score:4, Interesting)
Condolences to the family.
Not just a nice man (Score:5, Insightful)
In your remembrance of him, you make him out not just as a nice man, but, indeed as a great man.
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Not that great (Score:3, Funny)
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OTOH (Score:2, Insightful)
RIP, he was a really good writer also (Score:2, Interesting)
I will have to do a big search to find the current home for those papers. (if anyone knows, please share).
Cool (Score:2, Insightful)
An author, too (Score:3, Informative)
one positive (Score:2)
Now Wheeler will finally have the chance to find out what happened to that suitcase he lost on the train.
You know, the one full of thermonuclear weapons secrets.
Or maybe his heirs will find it in the attic.
another obit (Score:5, Informative)
Penny (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish I had kept mine.
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That it's an event horizon is proved by the facts that no one ever came back, we don't get any information from the other side, and sooner or later we all will fall through it.
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