I know this past week I've been rather caught up in other business so now I'd like to make up for it and finally comment on the passing last week of two of the 20th century's physics giants: John Wheeler and Edward Lorenz.
John A. Wheeler passed away on Sunday, April 13th at the respectable age of 96. Dr Wheeler, a professor of physics at Princeton became famous for his considerable body of work in theoretical physics, which in particular led him to coin the term 'black hole' to describe the singular solutions to Einstein's equation of general relativity. During the war, Wheeler was a major contributor to the Manhattan project and later on did some design work on the hydrogen bomb. But more importantly, John Wheeler was the PhD advisor of none other than Richard P. Feynman, who said of him, "Some people think he's gotten crazy in his later years, but he's always been crazy."
At the opposite end of the physics spectrum, Edward Lorenz was the classic example of a very practical-minded experimental scientist, whose great sense of observation led him to the realization that a great sensitivity to initial conditions in a numerical weather simulation model he was working on at MIT was not just a bug in his program but an essential feature of the dynamics of the atmosphere itself and many other physical systems. Lorenz subsequently published an article entitled 'Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?', which gave the chaotic nature of the weather its nickname of 'Butterfly Effect.' Chaos theory was born, setting off what was qualified as the third revolution of twentieth century physics, after relativity and quantum physics.
May both of you gentlemen find peace in the Nirvana of physics!
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