The world lost a remarkable scientific figure of the 20th century on the morning of April 13, 2008, when John Archibald Wheeler passed away at his home in Hightstown, N.J. at the age of 96. His death occurred one year after his wife Janette had passed away at the age of 99. His daughter, Alison Wheeler Lahnston, said he had been struggling with pneumonia for the past week.

Born on July 9, 1911, John A. Wheeler became known as the physicist who studied quantum mechanics and actively participated in the development of the atomic bomb, as part of the Manhattan Project, where he collaborated with Niels Bohr and Robert Oppenheimer. Although one of the most prominent figures in physics, the American scientist never received the Nobel Prize.

After the Manhattan Project was over, Wheeler turned to an academic career at Princeton, and worked on concepts such as “wormholes” (term introduced in 1957 that describes a space-time connection which would theoretically allow time travel) and “black holes” (term introduced in 1967, which describes a region formed by the gravitational collapse of a star or the collision between neutron stars with a gravitational field so strong that nothing can escape it, not even light).

With his help, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity became the subject of intense research at Princeton: “He rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians,” said Freeman Dyson, theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the New York Times reports.

He worked with Bohr on several occasions and in an interview with The New York Times, Wheeler said about this collaboration: “You can talk about people like Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Confucius. But the thing that convinced me that such people existed were the conversations with Bohr.”

Despite his age, John A. Wheeler chose to remain active, and went to his office two days a week, his son said. Not only was he remarkable in his own career, but he also influenced the careers of other physicists, such as Richard Feynman, known for introducing the concept of nanotechnology, Kip Thorne, who contributed to gravitation physics and astrophysics, as well as Hugh Everett, who was the first scientist to propose many-world interpretation of quantum physics.