He was appointed director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Texas at Austin in 1976 and remained in the position until 1986, when he retired and became a professor emeritus.

[7] After graduating from Baltimore City College high school in 1926,[8] Wheeler entered Johns Hopkins University with a scholarship from the state of Maryland.

[11] He received a National Research Council fellowship, which he used to study under Gregory Breit at New York University in 1933 and 1934,[12] and then in Copenhagen under Niels Bohr in 1934 and 1935.

[13] In a 1934 paper, Breit and Wheeler introduced the Breit–Wheeler process, a mechanism by which photons can be potentially transformed into matter in the form of electron–positron pairs.

[9][14] The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill made Wheeler an associate professor in 1937, but he wanted to be able to work more closely with experts in particle physics.

[18] In 1938 Wheeler joined Edward Teller in examining Bohr's liquid drop model of the atomic nucleus;[20] they presented their results at a meeting of the American Physical Society in New York.

Wheeler's Chapel Hill graduate student Katharine Way also presented a paper, which she followed up in a subsequent article, detailing how the liquid drop model was unstable under certain conditions.

[16] Bohr and Wheeler set to work applying the liquid drop model to explain the mechanism of nuclear fission.

[25][26] Their first paper appeared in Physical Review on September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II.

[28] Soon after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into World War II, Wheeler accepted a request from Arthur Compton to join the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago.

[29] He co-wrote a paper with Robert F. Christy on "Chain Reaction of Pure Fissionable Materials in Solution", which was important in the plutonium purification process.

[32][33] After the United States Army Corps of Engineers took over the Manhattan Project, it gave DuPont responsibility for the detailed design and construction of the reactors.

[36] DuPont's task was to build not just nuclear reactors, but an entire plutonium production complex at the Hanford Site in Washington.

[38] In an April 1942 report, he predicted that this would reduce the reactivity by less than one percent so long as no fission product had a neutron capture cross section of more than 100,000 barns.

[51] The 1949 detonation of Joe-1 by the Soviet Union prompted an all-out effort by the United States, led by Teller, to develop the more powerful hydrogen bomb in response.

[52] Those who agreed to participate included Emil Konopinski, Marshall Rosenbluth, Lothar Nordheim, and Charles Critchfield, but there was also now a body of experienced weapons physicists at the Los Alamos Laboratory, led by Norris Bradbury.

[57] In 1951 Wheeler obtained Bradbury's permission to set up a branch office of the Los Alamos laboratory at Princeton, known as Project Matterhorn, which had two parts.

Matterhorn S (for stellarator, another name coined by Wheeler), under Lyman Spitzer, investigated nuclear fusion as a power source.

[58] Matterhorn B's efforts were crowned by the success of the Ivy Mike nuclear test at Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific, on November 1, 1952,[59][58] which Wheeler witnessed.

The yield of the Ivy Mike "Sausage" device was reckoned at 10.4 megatons of TNT (44 PJ), about 30 percent higher than Matterhorn B had estimated.

[60] In January 1953 Wheeler was involved in a security breach when he lost a highly classified paper on lithium-6 and the hydrogen bomb design during an overnight train trip.

In a 1955 paper, he theoretically investigated the geon, an electromagnetic or gravitational wave held together in a confined region by the attraction of its own field.

[69] While working on mathematical extensions to Einstein's general relativity in 1957, Wheeler introduced the concept and word wormhole to describe hypothetical "tunnels" in space-time.

He was appointed director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Texas at Austin in 1976 and remained in the position until 1986, when he retired[17] and became a professor emeritus.

These experiments seek to discover whether light somehow "senses" the experimental apparatus that it travels through in the double-slit experiment, adjusting its behavior to fit by assuming an appropriate determinate state, or whether it remains in an indeterminate state, neither wave nor particle, and responds to the "questions" the experimental arrangements ask of it in either a wave-consistent manner or a particle-consistent manner.

[78] Wheeler's graduate students included Jacob Bekenstein, Hugh Everett, Richard Feynman, David Hill, Bei-Lok Hu, John R. Klauder, Charles Misner, Kip Thorne, William Unruh, Robert M. Wald, Katharine Way, and Arthur Wightman.

His writing style could also attract parodies, including one by "John Archibald Wyler" that was affectionately published by a relativity journal.

Otherwise put, every it—every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits.

[91]In 1979, Wheeler spoke to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), asking it to expel parapsychology, which had been admitted ten years earlier at Margaret Mead's request.

He called it a pseudoscience,[92] saying he did not oppose earnest research into the questions, but thought the "air of legitimacy" of being an AAAS affiliate should be reserved until convincing tests of at least a few so-called psi effects could be demonstrated.