John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008)
American theoretical physicist who largely revived interest in general relativity in the United States after WWII. Popularized the term “black hole”; coined “quantum foam,” “wormhole,” and “it from bit”; hypothesized the “one-electron universe.” Stephen Hawking called him the “hero of the black hole story.”
Role in the Many-Worlds Interpretation
Wheeler was Hugh Everett’s PhD thesis advisor at Princeton and contributed the title “relative state” to Everett’s 1957 formulation. He made considerable efforts to make the theory palatable to Bohr, visiting Copenhagen in 1956 and convincing Everett to visit in 1959 — Bohr rejected the theory. In 1957 Wheeler wrote: “No escape seems possible from this relative state formulation if one wants to have a complete mathematical model for the quantum mechanics.” He disavowed the theory in 1980.
Career
PhD at Johns Hopkins at age 21 under Karl Herzfeld. Worked with Niels Bohr to explain nuclear fission (1939, liquid drop model). Manhattan Project: Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago and Hanford Site. Helped design the hydrogen bomb with Edward Teller. Professor at Princeton 1938–1976, where he supervised 46 PhD students — more than any other physics professor. Later at the University of Texas at Austin. Died 13 April 2008.
References
- Wikipedia (2026). John Archibald Wheeler. 1