RIP John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008)

I found out from a colleague at dinner tonight that John Archibald Wheeler died on Sunday. Here is a link to an obituary published by the New York Times.

Among other things, Wheeler coined the term 'black hole' and coauthored the monstrosity of a book called Gravitation that has been used as the Physics 236 textbook at Caltech for years and which really needs to be updated. (He did a lot of pretty good science too...) He also co-wrote an elementary special relativity textbook that I used as a frosh. The explanations in that book were generally good, but the presentation of the problems was often rather long-winded (it was sometimes difficult to find the question amidst all the text) and he and his coauthor used made the absolutely retarded choice of called the "momentum-energy 4-vector" (which would be more accurately called a "tensor" anyway) as the 'momenergy' 4-vector. WTF! That remains one of the most retarded terms I have ever seen applied to a scientific object, so I guess he was just trying to make up for black hole. (Given that Ben Miller was a fellow Lloyd frosh from my year, this naturally led to lots of comments involving 'mom' and 'energy.')