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John Archibald Wheeler (July 9, 1911 – April 13, 2008) was an American theoretical physicist. He was largely responsible for reviving interest in general relativity in the United States after World War II. Wheeler also worked with Niels Bohr in explaining the basic principles behind nuclear fission. Together with Gregory Breit, Wheeler developed the concept of Breit–Wheeler process. He is also known for popularizing the term "black hole", for coining the terms "neutron moderator", "quantum foam", "wormhole", and "it from bit", and for hypothesizing the "one-electron universe". Wheeler earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University under the supervision of Karl Herzfeld, and studied under Breit and Bohr on a National Research Council fellowship. In 1939 he teamed up with Bohr to write a series of papers using the liquid drop model to explain the mechanism of fission. During World War II, he worked with the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, where he helped design nuclear reactors, and then at the Hanford Site in Richland, Washington, where he helped DuPont build them. He returned to Princeton after the war ended, but returned to government service to help design and build the hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s. For most of his career, Wheeler was a professor at Princeton University, which he joined in 1938, remaining until his retirement in 1976. At Princeton he supervised 46 PhDs, more than any other professor in the Princeton physics department. He was influential in mentoring a generation of physicists of the Golden Age of General Relativity, who made notable contributions to quantum mechanics and gravitation. == Early life == Wheeler was born in Jacksonville, Florida on July 9, 1911 to librarians Joseph Lewis Wheeler and Mabel Archibald (Archie) Wheeler. He was the oldest of four children, having two younger brothers, Joseph and Robert, and a younger sister, Mary. Joseph earned a Ph.D. from Brown University and a Master of Library Science from Columbia University. Robert earned a Ph.D. in geology from Harvard University and worked as a geologist for oil companies and at colleges. Mary studied library science at the University of Denver and became a librarian. They grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, but spent a year in 1921 to 1922 on a farm in Benson, Vermont, where Wheeler attended a one-room school. After they returned to Youngstown he attended Rayen High School. After graduating from the Baltimore City College high school in 1926, Wheeler entered Johns Hopkins University with a scholarship from the state of Maryland. He published his first scientific paper in 1930, as part of a summer job at the National Bureau of Standards. He earned his doctorate in 1933. His dissertation research work, carried out under the supervision of Karl Herzfeld, was on the "Theory of the Dispersion and Absorption of Helium".〔 He received a National Research Council fellowship, which he used to study under Gregory Breit at New York University in 1933 and 1934, and then in Copenhagen under Niels Bohr in 1934 and 1935. In a 1934 paper, Breit and Wheeler introduced the Breit–Wheeler process, a mechanism by which photons can be potentially transformed into matter in the form of electron-positron pairs. In 1933 Wheeler began dating Janette Hegner, who was taking graduate courses in history at Johns Hopkins. Their relationship continued in New York the following year, after she began teaching at Rye Country Day School. They became engaged on their third date, but agreed to defer marriage until after he returned from Europe. They were married on June 10, 1935, five days after his return. They had three children: Letitia, James English and Alison Wheeler. Jobs were hard to come by during the Great Depression, but Arthur Ruark offered him a position as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, at an annual salary of $2,300, which was less than the $2,400 Janette was offered to stay at Rye Country Day School.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「John Archibald Wheeler」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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