John A. Wheeler, the fertile-minded physicist who popularized mind-stretching ideas about black holes, wormholes 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 poor 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, seeming to be present at every important event or discovery. In a career that spanned eight decades, Wheeler consulted with Niels Bohr and Robert Oppenheimer to build the atomic bomb, helped Edward Teller with the hydrogen 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 his 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 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 eldest 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 -- if any answer is possible -- 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.
Curious to the point of ignoring the need for self-preservation, he set off bottle rockets indoors and once touched an 11,000-volt power line to see what it felt like.
