John Archibald Wheeler

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 to explain the basic principles of nuclear fission. Together with Gregory Breit, Wheeler explored positron-electron pair production from the collision of two photons, now known as the Breit–Wheeler process. He is known for popularizing the term "black hole" to describe the gravitationally completely collapsed objects predicted by general relativity. He also coined "quantum foam", "neutron moderator", "wormhole" and "it from bit", and hypothesized the "one-electron universe". Stephen Hawking called Wheeler the "hero of the black hole story".

At 21, Wheeler earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University under the supervision of Karl Herzfeld. He studied under Breit and Bohr on a National Research Council fellowship. In 1939 he collaborated with Bohr on 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 but returned to government service to help design and build the hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s. He and Edward Teller were the main civilian proponents of thermonuclear weapons.