In March 2002, to honor John Archibald Wheeler’s 90th birthday year, a group of researchers gathered near Princeton University for a symposium dedicated to exploring new approaches to difficult problems in the fields of quantum mechanics, cosmology, and information science—areas to which Wheeler has made many contributions over a long and distinguished career. One of the results of the symposium is Science and Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology and Complexity, a well-organized survey of some of the boundaries of modern science.
A short list of Wheeler’s achievements ranges across large swaths of 20th-century physics. He studied with Niels Bohr in the late 1930s and developed the theory of nuclear fission, he developed action-at-a-distance electrodynamics with Richard Feynman (whose Ph.D. thesis he supervised), and he resurrected from obscurity the study of black holes, a term he coined, in the 1950s and 1960s. Wheeler studied the quantum measurement problem and developed...
