John Archibald Wheeler is dead at 96

John A. Wheeler, a towering presence in 20th century physics, has died age 96.

Wheeler, who worked on fission, relativity and cosmology at Princeton and latterly at the University of Texas, Austin, was responsible for such dramatic descriptive terms as "black hole" and "worm hole". He counted among his students Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate and all-round physics genius. Like Feynman, Wheeler was also engaged in the Manhattan Project during WWII on the development of the atomic bomb.

Wheeler really was one of the last of the "greats" of the 20th century revolution in Physics and was quite inspirational. For my money, his senior undergraduate texts "Spacetime Physics" (with EF Taylor) and "Exploring Black Holes" (also with EF Taylor) are classics, highly accessible and entertaining. As an undergrad I ploughed through "Spacetime Physics" for a course on relativity and a lot of the quirky examples have stayed with me clear as day for the past 20 years. The field needs more educators like Wheeler.

See New York Times Science.