But their contributions were innumerable. On his 90th birthday, Dyson said that Wheeler was in part a master craftsman who decoded nuclear fission and, in part, poet. The poetic Wheeler is a prophet – he said – as Moses looks towards the promised land that someday his people he will inherit. Brian Armstrong addresses the importance of the matter here. Wheeler also had a full family life, with his wife, who died a year ago, three children, eight grandchildren, 16 great-grandchildren, six tataranietos and 11 choznos. Contact information is here: Jill Bikoff. Wheeler was a young professor in 1939 when the Danish physicist Niels Bohr came to the United States and entrusted him with that German scientists had succeeded in the fission of uranium atoms. In a few weeks, he and Bohr had outlined a theory of how nuclear fission worked. As a professor at Princeton and then at the University of Texas at Austin, Wheeler established the agenda for generations of theoretical physicists, using metaphor as effectively as calculus to capture the imagination of his students and colleagues, and to raise questions which, with their burning minds, would send them to the barricades to confront nature. Max Tegmark, of the Massachusetts Institute of technology cosmologist, Wheeler said: for me, it was the last titan, the only superhero of physics that still stands.
With his leadership, Princeton became the most important center of research of the general theory of relativity, a field of research that was moribund by its scant connection to the experiments. He rejuvenated general relativity; It became an experimental subject and he pulled out of the orbit of the mathematicians, said Freeman Dyson, theorist of the Institute of postgraduate of Princeton, where today works the Argentine physicist Juan Maldacena. Among Wheeler’s students was Richard Feynman, the technological Institute of California, whose work on a seemingly senseless suggestion of Wheeler led to a Nobel Prize. Also Hugh Everett, whose thesis in quantum mechanics with the direction of Wheeler suggested that there are parallel universes that are crossing and will divide continuously, notion that Bryce DeWitt, of the University of Texas at Austin, called many worlds and has become one of the favorite themes of many cosmologists both as science fiction writers.
