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 declining health for the past 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 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 ideas such 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.
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