biography
| name: |
Wheeler, John Archibald
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1911– )
|
| biography:
| Theoretical physicist, born in Jacksonville, Florida, USA. He studied at Johns Hopkins and Copenhagen universities, and spent most of his career at Princeton (1938–76), before moving to the University of Texas, Austin (1976–86). With Niels Bohr, he explained the mechanism of nuclear fission (1939), and later led a Princeton team working on the hydrogen bomb (Project Matterhorn). He worked with Richard Feynman on ‘action at a distance’ in electrodynamics, and contributed to a model of nuclear structure that was later developed into the collective model by Aage Bohr and Ben Mottelson. He also worked on the problem of gravitational collapse, introduced the term black hole (1968), and proposed the idea of space-time ‘wormholes’ linking different regions of space-time. |
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