Aww, the man who invented black holes died. Now who is going to show us how to stuff ten pounds of stuff into a five pound sack?

__________________
"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

Not to take away from Stick's thread about Lorenz, but I also heard John Wheeler just passed away.
LINK
I heard him speak about 20 years ago - wonderful speaker. A big loss.

__________________
At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Sad way to go, but that kind of longevity is nothing to regret.

__________________
"I always look for a woman who has a tattoo. I see a woman with a tattoo, and I'm thinking, 'OK, here's a gal who's capable of making a decision she'll regret in the future.'"- Richard Jeni.

Daniel Holz, one of bloggers at Cosmic Variance, was one of Wheeler's students. He has a very moving goodbye posted there. It's worth a read.

__________________
"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

What Eta C said. A beautiful piece.

__________________
At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Indeed.

He taught Richard Feynman.

This is the same comment I left over at Cosmic Variance:

No offense to anyone here but Wheeler himself made the following comment in an interview which I cannot locate but will explain since it is one of the most inciteful things I ever picked up from him. He was asked by his interviewer what he was trying to pass on to his students for them to learn.

His response was that his students never learned a thing from him. Students do not learn from teachers. They learn by teaching.

I took that to mean that when we all turn to stand in front of a class and give a lecture there are many minds in our audience of students. The students’ viewpoints vary over a large spectrum with misinterpretations or new incites that we likely have not considered when we were students. Now, as teachers, we must consider them and be prepared to give a quantitative response if one is possible or an experiment that can realize the answer.