A trio of passings to mention.
Over the weekend, the physicist John A. Wheeler died at the age of 96. Wheeler is best remembered in our time for coining the term “black hole” in his cosmological work, though he initially disputed the idea of singularities. His writings and research in quantum physics are the background for the work being done today at sites like the Large Hadron Collider. In his earlier years, Wheeler studied with Niels Bohr, worked on the Manhattan Project, and was the mentor of another legendary physicist, the late Richard Feynman. Writing at the group science blog “Cosmic Variance”, Daniel Holz offered this personal remembrance of Wheeler, who taught him at Princeton (via).
On Wednesday it was reported that former Disney animator Ollie Johnston had passed away at the age of 95. Johnston was one of a group of senior animators who had worked with Walt Disney from the earliest days of the studio and collectively were known as “The Nine Old Men”. These men would animate and direct every animated feature film made by the Walt Disney Studio from “Snow White” in 1937 right up to “The Fox And The Hound” in 1981. Johnston himself directed “Cinderella”, “Peter Pan”, “Sleeping Beauty”, and “The Jungle Book”. He also worked as an animator on most of the other major films of the Disney Studio. Brad Bird, the animator who directed “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille” for Pixar/Disney writes that on his very first day as a junior animator at Disney, he was assigned to the desk where Johnston had sat for all those years and who had only retired the previous Friday. He got to know Johnston, Frank Thomas, and most of the other Nine Old Men during his apprentice years at Disney, and remembers them all fondly in the article. Bird even managed to squeeze in some “cameo appearances” for Johnston: he appears as a character in both “The Iron Giant” and in “The Incredibles”.
This morning it is reported that another legendary scientist has passed away at the age of 90 — Edward Lorenz, an originator of chaos theory. Lorenz was working on predictive methods for weather systems in the early 1960s, when he noticed that even tiny variances in data plugged into his simulation programs could produce extremely large differences in outcomes. This theory is popularly explained as the “butterfly effect”: one butterfly flapping its wings can change the dynamic state of a weather system on a scale so large as to cause giant storms hundreds of miles away. His work earned him the Kyoto Prize in 1991, and he was still teaching at MIT at the time of his death.
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