John Archibald Wheeler (born July 9, 1911) is an eminent American theoretical physicist. One of the later collaborators of Albert Einstein, he tried to achieve Einstein's vision of a unified field theory. He is also known as the coiner of the popular name of the well known space phenomenon, the black hole.
There is always somebody who is the teacher and from them, their is a progeny. It would not be right not to mention John Archibald Wheeler. Or, not to mention some of his students.
Notable students
Demetrios Christodoulou
Richard Feynman
Jacob Bekenstein
Robert Geroch
Bei-Lok Hu
John R. Klauder
Charles Misner
Milton Plesset
Kip Thorne
Arthur Wightman
Hugh Everett
Bill Unruh
So it is with some respect that as we move back in time we see the names of those who have brought us forward ever closer to the understanding and ideal of some phenomenological approach so as to say such a course of events has indeed been fruitful. Also, to say that such branches that exist off of John Archibald Wheeler's work serve to remind us of the wide diversity of approaches to understanding and developing gravitational approaches to acceptance and development.
COSMIC SEARCH: How did you come up with the name "black hole"?
John Archibald Wheeler: It was an act of desperation, to force people to believe in it. It was in 1968, at the time of the discussion of whether pulsars were related to neutron stars or to these completely collapsed objects. I wanted a way of emphasizing that these objects were real. Thus, the name "black hole".
The Russians used the term frozen star—their point of attention was how it looked from the outside, where the material moves much more slowly until it comes to a horizon.* (*Or critical distance. From inside this distance there is no escape.) But, from the point of view of someone who's on the material itself, falling in, there's nothing special about the horizon. He keeps on going in. There's nothing frozen about what happens to him. So, I felt that that aspect of it needed more emphasis.
So as we go back in time we see where certain functions as a description and features of a reality has to suggest there was some beginning. It is also the realization that such a beginning sought to ask us to consider the function and reality of such new concepts so as to force us to deal with the fundamentals of that reality.
Dr. Kip Thorne, Caltech 13 |
So again, as we go back in time we see where such beginnings in sciences approach has to have it's beginning not only as a recognition of the black hole, but of where we have been lead toward today's approach to gravity in terms of what is discrete and what is considered, a continuum. These functions, as gravity, show a certain distinction then in terms of today's science as they exist from John Archibald Wheeler's approach so as to that question to his search for links to, Information, Physics and the Quantum began.