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ler 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 2 to describe the gravitationally completely collapsed objects predicted by general relativity he also coined quantum foam neutron moderator wormhole and it from bit 3 and hypothesized the one electron universe stephen hawking called wheeler the hero of the black hole story 4 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 5 for most of his career wheeler was a professor of physics at princeton university which he joined in 1938 remaining until 1976 at princeton he supervised 46 phd students more than any other physics professor wheeler left princeton at the age of 65 he was appointed director of the center for theoretical physics at the university of texas at austin in 1976 and remained in the position until 1986 when he retired and became a professor emeritus with kip thorne and charles misner he coauthored the general relativity textbook gravitation early life and education edit wheeler was born in jacksonville florida on july 9 1911 to librarians joseph l wheeler and mabel archibald archie wheeler 6 he was the oldest of four children his brother joseph earned a phd from brown university and a master of library science from columbia university his brother robert earned a phd in geology from harvard university and worked as a geologist for oil companies and several colleges his sister mary studied library science at the university of denver and became a librarian 7 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 when they returned to youngstown he attended rayen high school 8 after graduating from baltimore city college high school in 1926 9 wheeler entered johns hopkins university with a scholarship from the state of maryland 10 he published his first scientific paper in 1930 as part of a summer job at the national bureau of standards 11 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 12 he received a national research council fellowship which he used to study under gregory breit at new york university in 1933 and 1934 13 and then in copenhagen under niels bohr in 1934 and 1935 14 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 10 15 early career edit the university of north carolina at chapel hill made wheeler an associate professor in 1937 but he wanted to be able to work more closely with experts in particle physics 16 he turned down an offer in 1938 of an associate professorship at johns hopkins university in favor of an assistant professorship at princeton university although it was a lesser position he felt that princeton which was building up its physics department was a better career choice 17 he remained a member of its faculty until 1976 18 in his 1937 paper on the mathematical description of light nuclei by the method of resonating group structure wheeler introduced the s matrix short for scattering matrix a unitary matrix of coefficients connecting the asymptotic behavior of an arbitrary particular solution of the integral equations with that of solutions of a standard form 19 20 wheeler did not pursue this idea but in the 1940s werner heisenberg developed the idea of the s matrix into an important tool in elementary particle physics 19 in 1938 wheeler joined edward teller in examining bohr s liquid drop model of the atomic nucleus 21 they presented their results at a meeting of the american physical society in new york wheeler s chapel hill graduate student katharine way also presented a paper which she followed up in a subsequent article detailing how the liquid drop model was unstable under certain conditions due to a limitation of the liquid drop model they all missed the opportunity to predict nuclear fission 22 23 in 1939 bohr brought the news of lise meitner s and otto frisch s discovery of fission to america bohr told leon rosenfeld who informed wheeler 17 bohr and wheeler set to work applying the liquid drop model to explain the mechanism of nuclear fission 24 as the experimental physicists studied fission they uncovered puzzling results george placzek asked bohr why uranium seemed to fission with both very fast and very slow neutrons walking to a meeting with wheeler bohr had an insight that fission at low energies was due to the uranium 235 isotope while at high energies it was mainly due to the far more abundant uranium 238 isotope 25 they co wrote two more papers on fission 26 27 their first paper appeared in physical review on september 1 1939 the day germany invaded poland starting world war ii 28 considering the notion that positrons were electrons traveling backward in time in 1940 wheeler conceived his one electron universe postulate that there was in fact only one electron bouncing back and forth in time his graduate student richard feynman found this hard to believe but the idea that positrons were electrons traveling backward in time intrigued him and feynman incorporated the notion of the reversibility of time in his feynman diagrams 29 nuclear weapons edit manhattan project edit soon after the japanese bombing of pearl harbor brought the u s into world war ii wheeler accepted a request from arthur compton to join the manhattan project s metallurgical laboratory at the university of chicago he moved there in january 1942 28 joining eugene wigner s group which was studying nuclear reactor design 30 he co wrote a paper with robert f christy on chain reaction of pure fissionable materials in solution which was important in the plutonium purification process 31 it was declassified in december 1955 32 he gave the neutron moderator its name replacing enrico fermi s term slower downer 33 34 loading tubes of the hanford b reactor after the united states army corps of engineers took over the manhattan project it gave dupont responsibility for the detailed design and construction of the reactors 35 wheeler became part of dupont s design staff 36 he worked closely with its engineers commuting between chicago and wilmington delaware where dupont had its headquarters he moved his family to wilmington in march 1943 37 dupont s task was to build not just nuclear reactors but an entire plutonium production complex at the hanford site in washington 38 as work progressed wheeler relocated his family again in july 1944 to richland washington where he worked in the scientific buildings known as the 300 area 31 37 even before the hanford site started up the b reactor the first of its three reactors on september 15 1944 wheeler had been concerned that some nuclear fission products might be nuclear poisons the accumulation of which would impede the ongoing nuclear chain reaction by absorbing many of the thermal neutrons needed to continue a chain reaction 39 in an april 1942 report he predicted that this would reduce the reactivity by less than one percent so long as no fission product had a neutron capture cross section of more than 100 000 barns 40 after the reactor unexpectedly shut down and then just as unexpectedly restarted about 15 hours later he suspected iodine 135 with a half life of 6 6 hours and its daughter product xenon 135 which has a half life of 9 2 hours xenon 135 turned out to have a neutron capture cross section of well over two million barns the problem was corrected by adding additional fuel slugs to burn out the poison 41 wheeler had a personal reason for working on the manhattan project his brother joe fighting in italy sent him a postcard with a simple message hurry up 42 it was already too late joe was killed in october 1944 here we were wheeler later wrote so close to creating a nuclear weapon to end the war i couldn t stop thinking then and haven t stopped thinking since that the war could have been over in october 1944 41 joe left a widow and baby daughter mary jo who later married physicist james hartle 43 hydrogen bomb edit in august 1945 wheeler and his family returned to princeton where he resumed his academic career 44 working with feynman he explored the possibility of physics with particles but not fields and carried out theoretical studies of the muon with jayme tiomno 45 resulting in a series of papers on the topic 46 47 including a 1949 paper in which tiomno and wheeler introduced the tiomno triangle which related different forms of radioactive decay 48 he also suggested the use of muons as a nuclear probe this paper written and privately circulated in 1949 but not published until 1953 49 resulted in a series of measurements of the chang radiation emitted by muons muons are a component of cosmic rays and wheeler became the founder and first director of princeton s cosmic rays laboratory which received a grant of 375 000 from the office of naval research in 1948 50 wheeler received a guggenheim fellowship in 1946 51 which allowed him to spend the 1949 50 academic year in paris 52 the sausage device of ivy mike nuclear test on enewetak atoll the sausage was the first true hydrogen bomb ever tested the 1949 detonation of joe 1 by the soviet union prompted an all out effort by the united states led by teller to develop the more powerful hydrogen bomb in response henry d smyth wheeler s department head at princeton asked him to join the effort most physicists were like wheeler trying to reestablish careers interrupted by the war and reluctant to face more disruption others had moral objections 53 those who agreed to participate included emil konopinski marshall rosenbluth lothar nordheim and charles critchfield but there was also now a body of experienced weapons physicists at the los alamos laboratory led by norris bradbury 54 55 wheeler agreed to go to los alamos after a conversation with bohr 53 two of his graduate students from princeton ken ford and john toll joined him there 56 at los alamos wheeler and his family moved into the house on bathtub row that robert oppenheimer and his family had occupied during the war 57 in 1950 there was no practical design for a hydrogen bomb calculations by stanisław ulam and others showed that teller s classical super would not work teller and wheeler created a new design known as alarm clock but it was not a true thermonuclear weapon not until january 1951 did ulam come up with a workable design 58 in 1951 wheeler obtained bradbury s permission to set up a branch office of the los alamos laboratory at princeton known as project matterhorn which had two parts matterhorn s for stellarator another name coined by wheeler under lyman spitzer investigated nuclear fusion as a power source matterhorn b for bomb under wheeler did nuclear weapons research senior scientists remained uninterested and aloof from the project so he staffed it with young graduate and postdoctoral students 59 matterhorn b s efforts were crowned by the success of the ivy mike nuclear test at enewetak atoll in the pacific on november 1 1952 60 59 which wheeler witnessed the yield of the ivy mike sausage device was reckoned at 10 4 megatons of tnt 44 pj about 30 percent higher than matterhorn b had estimated 61 in january 1953 wheeler was involved in a security breach when he lost a highly classified paper on lithium 6 and the hydrogen bomb design during an overnight train trip 62 63 this resulted in an official reprimand 64 matterhorn b was discontinued but matterhorn s endures as the princeton plasma physics laboratory 59 later academic career edit after concluding his matterhorn project work wheeler resumed his academic career in a 1955 paper he theoretically investigated the geon an electromagnetic or gravitational wave held together in a confined region by the attraction of its own field he coined the name as a contraction of gravitational electromagnetic entity 65 he found that the smallest geon was a toroid the size of the sun but millions of times heavier he later showed that geons are unstable and would quickly self destruct if they were ever to form 66 geometrodynamics edit during the 1950s wheeler formulated geometrodynamics a program of physical and ontological reduction of every physical phenomenon such as gravitation and electromagnetism to the geometrical properties of a curved space time his research on the subject was published in 1957 and 1961 67 68 wheeler envisaged the fabric of the universe as a chaotic subatomic realm of quantum fluctuations which he called quantum foam 65 69 general relativity edit general relativity had been considered a less respectable field of physics being detached from experiment wheeler was a key figure in its revival leading the school at princeton while dennis william sciama and yakov borisovich zel dovich developed the subject at cambridge university and the university of moscow respectively wheeler and his students made substantial contributions to the field during the golden age of general relativity 70 while working on mathematical extensions to einstein s general relativity in 1957 wheeler introduced the concept and word wormhole to describe hypothetical tunnels in space time bohr asked whether they were stable and further research by wheeler determined that they are not 71 72 his work in general relativity included the theory of gravitational collapse he used the term black hole in 1967 during a talk he gave at the nasa goddard institute of space studies giss 73 although the term had been used earlier in the decade a he used it in a 1967 lecture for the american association for the advancement of science our universe known and unknown b y reason of its faster and faster infall the surface of the imploding star moves away from the distant observer more and more rapidly the light is shifted to the red it becomes dimmer millisecond by millisecond and in less than a second is too dark to see the star like the cheshire cat fades from view one leaves only its grin the other only its gravitational attraction gravitational...