John Archibald Wheeler

John Archibald Wheeler (1911 to 2008) was an American theoretical physicist, born in Jacksonville, Florida, who took his doctorate at Johns Hopkins at 21. In 1939 he worked with Niels Bohr to explain the mechanism of nuclear fission using the liquid drop model. During the Second World War he helped design nuclear reactors at the Manhattan Project Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago and then at the Hanford Site in Washington, where he helped DuPont build them. He later worked on the hydrogen bomb. He spent most of his career at Princeton University, where he supervised 46 doctoral students, and he led the Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Texas at Austin from 1976 to 1986. He revived American interest in general relativity and popularized the term black hole. His honours include the Enrico Fermi Award in 1968 and a Wolf Foundation Prize in 1997.