John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008) was an erudite scholar of physics, but it wasn’t only his knowledge of the subject that people admire him for, but also his skills in mentoring and guiding students from an undergraduate level to post-doctorate. The following piece from Kip Thorne’s memoir of Wheeler will shed some light on his life as both a physicist and a mentor: -
“In his later years, Wheeler developed a reputation for proposing weird, and seemingly crazy ideas. One day in 1971 Wheeler, Feynman and I(Kip Thorne) had lunch together at the Burger Continental near Caltech. Over Armenian food, Wheeler described to Feynman and me his idea that the laws of physics are mutable: Those laws must have come into being in our universe’s Big Bang birth, and surely there are other universes, each with its own set of laws. “What principles determine which laws emerge in our universe and which in another?” he asked.? Feynman turned to me and said, “This guy sounds crazy. What people of your generation don’t know is that he has always sounded crazy. But when I was his student [30 years earlier], I discovered that, if you take one of his crazy ideas and you unwrap the layers of craziness one after another like lifting the layers off an onion, at the heart of the idea you will often find a powerful kernel of truth.” Feynman then recalled Wheeler’s 1942 idea that positrons are electrons going backward in time, and the importance of that idea in Feynman’s Nobel Prize-winning formulation of quantum electrodynamics (QED).”
Among all his students some of them are Richard P Feynman, Kip Thorne, Joseph (Joe) Weber, James Hartle( as a Undergraduate), Bryce DeWitt(Wheeler-DeWitt Equation) and many more.