John A. Wheeler, 96; physicist coined the term 'black hole'

John Johnson

Times Staff Writer

John A. Wheeler, the fertile-minded physicist who popularized mind-stretching ideas about black holes, worm holes and quantum foam and also confounded admirers by helping to conceive some of the most potent weapons of mass destruction, has died. He was 96.

Wheeler died Sunday morning of pneumonia at his home in Hightstown, N.J., according to his daughter Alison Wheeler Lahnston. He had been in failing health for the last week.

In the world of science, the 20th century was seen as the century of physics, and Wheeler was its most imaginative adman. He was also science's Zelig, seemingly everywhere something important happened, including the development of the atomic bomb. In a career that spanned eight decades, Wheeler consulted with Niels Bohr and Robert Oppenheimer to build the bomb, helped Edward Teller with the H-bomb, argued quantum mechanics with Albert Einstein and then, in middle age, turned his nimble mind to some of the most challenging problems of cosmology.

Are there multiple universes? If there are, how can we move from one to the other? Would anything exist if mankind -- the observer/participator -- wasn't around to see it?

He fearlessly explored such ideas as the possibility of traveling across deep space in fanciful constructs he named wormholes, by example giving lesser-known physicists the courage to pursue cosmological questions without fear of ridicule.

Along the way, he nurtured the careers of a new generation of physicists, from Nobel laureate Richard Feynman to Caltech's Kip Thorne.

To the end, Wheeler asked the Big Questions, adopting a personal mantra, "How come the quantum? How come existence?"

"Some people think Wheeler's gotten crazy in his later years," Feynman said. "But he's always been crazy."

Born July 9, 1911, in Jacksonville, Fla., John Archibald Wheeler was the oldest of four children of peripatetic librarians. At age 4, he asked his mother about the universe. "Where does it end? How far out can you go?"

Her answer -- as far as you can -- didn't satisfy. "This created a terrible worry in my mind," he said in a 2003 interview. While still a child, Wheeler turned to J. Arthur Thompson's "Outline of Science," which he read in the snow while fetching maple syrup near his Vermont home.