John Archibald Wheeler

North Carolina · connected1911–2008

American physicist (1911-2008)

Worked at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

physicist, nuclear physicist, theoretical physicist, university teacher, non-fiction writer, astrophysicist

Quotations with a citation

I had the good fortune of having my first and only heart attack last January ... I call it good fortune because it taught me that there's a limited amount of time left and I better concentrate on one thing: How come existence? How come the quantum? Maybe those questions sound too philosophical, but maybe philosophy is too important to be left to the philosophers.

If I had to confess, under torture, right now, what I think the simple idea is, I would say it's that we ourselves generate the world; the world is self-generated. But it may well be absolutely wrong.

Space tells matter how to move Matter tells space how to curve

Of all heroes, Spinoza was Einstein's greatest. No one expressed more strongly than he a belief in the harmony, the beauty, and most of all the ultimate comprehensibility of nature.

Is the very mechanism for the universe to come into being meaningless or unworkable or both unless the universe is guaranteed to produce life, consciousness and observership somewhere and for some little time in its history-to-be? The quantum principle shows that there is a sense in which what the observer will do in the future defines what happens in the past—even in a past so remote that life did not then exist, and shows even more, that 'observership' is a prerequisite for any useful version of 'reality'.

Of all obstacles to a thoroughly penetrating account of existence, none looms up more dismayingly than “time.” Explain time? Not without explaining existence. Explain existence? Not without explaining time. To uncover the deep and hidden connection between time and existence, to close on itself our quartet of questions, is a task for the future.

I like to think that someone will trace how the deepest thinking of India made its way to Greece and from there to the philosophy of our times.

Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that when — in a decade, a century, or a millennium — we grasp it, we will all say to each other, "Oh, how could it have been otherwise!"

We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.

Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.

Today I think we are beginning to suspect that man is not a tiny cog that doesn’t really make much difference to the running of the huge machine, but rather that there is a much more intimate tie between man and the universe than we heretofore suspected…The physical world is in some deep sense tied to the human being.

We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago. We are in this sense, participators in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past and if we have one explanation for what's happening in the distant past why should we need more?

The question is—what is the question?

Therefore we can afford many mistakes in the search. The main thing is to make them as fast as possible.

We will first understand how simple the universe is when we realize how strange it is.

In the libraries

Open Library A journey into gravity and spacetime · 1990 View library record ↗ Open Library At Home in the Universe (Masters of Modern Physics) · 1995 View library record ↗ Open Library At home in the universe · 1994 View library record ↗ Open Library Fundamental problems in quantum theory · 1995 View library record ↗ Open Library Geons, black holes, and quantum foam · 1998 View library record ↗ Open Library Spacetime physics · 1971 View library record ↗

Read John Archibald Wheeler

At home in the universe 1994 Find a copy Fundamental problems in quantum theory 1995 Find a copy Spacetime physics 1971 Find a copy Geons, black holes, and quantum foam 1998 Find a copy At Home in the Universe (Masters of Modern Physics) 1995 Find a copy A journey into gravity and spacetime 1990 Find a copy

Recorded without a firm citation

Kept here, labelled, rather than mixed in above.

Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening all at once.

It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.

There are many modes of thinking about the world around us and our place in it. I like to consider all the angles from which we might gain perspective on our amazing universe and the nature of existence.

The best way to learn something is to have to teach it.

What we think of as smooth simple space is really a wiggly business.

For all our everyday experience, the geometry of space is smooth and flat. But as we examine it more closely, it must show oscillations. And still more closely, it must show foam, a foam-like structure. And that means that down at the very smallest distances, this idea of before and after really lose their meaning.