One year is passed after Wheelr poneer in Physics and Astronomy said good by to this motral world and went to a unknown teriotory. How sad it is for loosing a gem of a person.

It was on April 13, 2008, the news paper very qietly said  John Archibald Wheeler, a legend in physics who coined the term "black hole" and whose immense contributions to  the field of Physics,  succumbed to pneumonia.

During his  productive scientific life, he was well known for working in frontier areas.

" Wheeler used to probe far beyond the human knowledge, asking questions that later generations of physicists would take up and solve," said Kip Thorne, the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology.

Wheeler, according to James Peebles, Princeton's Albert Einstein Professor of Science Emeritus, was "something approaching a wonder of nature in the world of physics."

He also helped launch the careers of many prominent modern theoretical physicists, among them the late Nobel laureate Richard Feynman.
Wheeler used to say that students are there in the Research Institute - to teach the teachers !

In the early 1930s Wheeler had studied in Copenhagen under the  Danish physicist Niels Bohr; and in 1939 he was one of the first to greet Bohr when he arrived in the United States. Bohr informed him that German scientists had succeeded in splitting uranium atoms, and within a few weeks they had jointly published a treatise entitled The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission, which described a theory of the process and served as a foundation for all future research. They proved that only uranium 235 was the fissionable element that could be used as the explosive in an atomic bomb or as fuel in a nuclear reactor. Their research also predicted the fissionable characteristics of plutonium before it had been synthesised.
"John Wheeler, who started life with Niels Bohr in the '30s, in the nuclear physics era, became the father figure of modern general relativity two decades later," said Stanley Deser, a general relativitist at Brandeis University.

Returning to USA, wheeler joined Princeton. Soon Johny wheeler became the pet of the students. He used to give illluminating lectures with writing on the Chalk piece by both the hands. 

In his autobiography, titled "Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam,"  wheeler writes his appreciation to General theory of relativity.

In 1967, he was invited to give a talk on pulsars, then-mysterious deep-space objects, at NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York. As he spoke, he argued that something strange might be at the center, what he called a gravitationally completely collapsed object. He was searching the good name for the enigmatic entity. Some one shouted, What about Blackhole? 

"I had been searching for just the right term for months, mulling it over in bed, in the bathtub, in my car, wherever I had quiet moments," he later said. "Suddenly this name seemed exactly right." He kept using the term, in lectures and on papers, and it stuck.

Wheeler received numerous honors over the years, including the National Medal of Science, the Albert Einstein Prize, the Franklin Medal, the Niels Bohr International Gold Medal and the Wolf Foundation Prize. He was a past president of the American Physical Society and was a member of the American Philosophical Society, the Royal Academy, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the Royal Academy of Science and the Century Association. In the 1970s, he was a member of the U.S. General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament.

Wheeler continued to do government work after the war alongside his teaching commitments at Princeton. In 1949-50 he worked with Teller on the development of the hydrogen bomb, and between 1951 and 1953 he directed the operation of Project Matterhorn, a top-secret project to develop weaponry based on thermonuclear fuel. His passionate belief that the best research brains should be assisting in developing military weapons led to the formation of the Jason committee in 1960.

In 1966 Wheeler was appointed Professor of Physics at Princeton and the following year became president of the American Physical Society. In the 1960s he published four important books: Geometrodynamics (1962), on the geometry of space; Gravitation Theory and Graviation Collapse (with BK Harrison, 1965); Spacetime Physics (with Edwin F Taylor, 1966); and Einstein's Vision (1968).

Though the Nobel prize was eluded   to Weeler , he won  awards for his work, including the US Atomic Energy Commission's Enrico Fermi Award in 1968.