Once upon a time, I was an erstwhile physics major at Princeton University, but in the two years I spent lurking around Palmer Lab* and Jadwin Hall I never ran into John Wheeler. I regret that now. Wheeler by all accounts was not only brilliant, but supremely likeable (like most of the profs in that department, by the way).
Wheeler coined the term “black hole” in 1967 for the corpse of a massive star after it went supernova: hole because its mass punched a hole in space-time, black because it sucked in all available light. Wheeler also gave a name to a central theorem about black holes — that we can only observe their mass, angular momentum and electric charge — by quipping, “Black holes have no hair.”
Wheeler was an accomplished theoretical physicist, who participated in the development of the hydrogen bomb, our current understanding of astrophysics and many other topics. A member of the Princeton faculty from 1938-1976 (I switched majors during his last year), Wheeler taught for awhile at the University of Texas before returning to Princeton as professor emeritus.
There are plenty of stories in the ‘Net about Wheeler, but to get a flavor of the man’s personality, here are two exceptional links: The Daily Princetonian’s obituary and a memoir at Cosmic Variance, written by Daniel Holz (Princeton ‘92), who unlike me actually got to work with Wheeler.
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* I’m dating myself here. Palmer Lab is now part of the Frist Campus Center, external shots of which appear in the TV show, House M.D., as the fictitious Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital.
