HIGHTSTOWN, N.J. – John A. Wheeler, a physicist involved in the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb who later gave the space phenomenon black holes their name, has died at 96.
He died of pneumonia Sunday at his home in Hightstown, said his daughter, Alison Wheeler Lahnston.
Wheeler, who rubbed elbows with and argued with colossal figures in science such as Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr, provided a link to the not-too-distant past in his field.
Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told The New York Times for Monday's newspapers: "For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.''
Wheeler was born in 1911 in Jacksonville, Fla., but later moved to Baltimore.
At 21, he earned his doctorate in physics from Johns Hopkins University. A year later, he traveled to Copenhagen to study with Bohr, who won a Nobel Prize for his work describing the nature of the atom.
In 1939, Bohr arrived in the United States with the news that German scientists had split uranium atoms. With Bohr, Wheeler sketched out a theory of nuclear fission. By 1941, Wheeler was part of the Manhattan Project – a group of eminent scientists charged with building an atomic bomb for the United States.
Unlike some colleagues who regretted their roles in the project, Wheeler regretted that it was not ready in time to affect World War II in Europe. His brother, Joe, was killed in combat in Italy in 1944.
Wheeler spent most of his academic career as a professor at Princeton University. In 1976, with Princeton's retirement age looming in five years, he moved to the University of Texas.
In the 1950s and 60s, he initially resisted the idea that a dead star could collapse on itself and create a mass so dense that light could not escape from it. He later came to accept the phenomenon, though. In a 1967 conference in New York, someone shouted a suggested name for it from the audience: black hole. Wheeler made the name stick.
He later wrote in his 1999 autobiography, "Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics," that the black hole "teaches us that space can be crumpled like a piece of paper into an infinitesimal dot, that time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as 'sacred,' as immutable, are anything but.''
Wheeler and Janette Hegner were married in 1935. She died in October at 99. He is survived by three children and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
