John Archibald Wheeler, contemporary of Einstein and Bohr, died this past Sunday.
When he was at the University of Texas, he taught a non-major survey course on relativity and quantum mechanics. It was one of the best classes I took there. Professor Wheeler was witty, patient and a great teacher. Every lesson was designed to build on the last. I wish I had kept his handouts.
He had a wonderful, “ha, ha, only serious” view of cosmology, ending the term with a cartoon of a question mark with an eyeball at the end of the loop, looking back on itself, illustrating what he referred to as a “Participatory Anthropic Principle.” I’m probably misunderstanding what he meant by that, but the idea that observation of a photon that has been traveling for a billion years might affect the past is dizzying.
Daniel Holz, a student of Wheeler’s, has a great remembrance at Cosmic Variance.
