John Archibald Wheeler was a pioneering American theoretical physicist who played a crucial role in reviving interest in general relativity in the United States after World War II. Born in 1911, Wheeler earned his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University at the age of 21. Throughout his long and distinguished career, he collaborated with some of the most prominent scientists of the twentieth century, including Niels Bohr, with whom he explained the basic principles of nuclear fission using the liquid drop model.\n\nDuring World War II, Wheeler contributed to the Manhattan Project, assisting in the design and construction of nuclear reactors. He later became a key civilian proponent and developer of the hydrogen bomb alongside Edward Teller. Beyond his defense work, Wheeler spent most of his academic career at Princeton University, where he supervised forty-six doctoral students, and later directed the Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Texas at Austin.\n\nWheeler is widely remembered for his ability to coin and popularize evocative scientific terms that captured complex physical phenomena, including "black hole," "wormhole," "quantum foam," and "it from bit." His literary and educational legacy is cemented by his co-authorship of the monumental physics textbook Gravitation, written alongside Kip Thorne and Charles Misner, which remains a seminal text in the study of general relativity.
