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John Archibald Wheeler Quotes

John Archibald Wheeler was an American theoretical physicist. He was largely responsible for reviving interest in general relativity in the United States after World War II. Wheeler also worked with Niels Bohr in explaining the basic principles behind nuclear fission. Together with Gregory Breit, Wheeler developed the concept of the Breit–Wheeler process. He is best known for linking the term "black hole" to objects with gravitational collapse already predicted early in the 20th century, for coining the terms "quantum foam", "neutron moderator", "wormhole" and "it from bit", and for hypothesizing the "one-electron universe".

Wheeler earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University under the supervision of Karl Herzfeld, and studied under Breit and Bohr on a National Research Council fellowship. In 1939 he collaborated with Bohr to write a series of papers using the liquid drop model to explain the mechanism of fission. During World War II, he worked with the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, where he helped design nuclear reactors, and then at the Hanford Site in Richland, Washington, where he helped DuPont build them. He returned to Princeton after the war ended, but returned to government service to help design and build the hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s.

For most of his career, Wheeler was a professor of physics at Princeton University, which he joined in 1938, remaining until his retirement in 1976. At Princeton he supervised 46 PhDs, more than any other professor in the Princeton physics department. Wikipedia  

✵ 9. July 1911 – 13. April 2008
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Geons
John Archibald Wheeler
John Archibald Wheeler: 16   quotes 3   likes

Famous John Archibald Wheeler Quotes

“The question is—what is the question?”

John Archibald Wheeler

Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War (2008), chapter 13

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

John Archibald Wheeler

Scientific American (1992), Vol. 267.

“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.”

John Archibald Wheeler

As quoted by Amanda Gefter (from the symposium in honor of Wheeler's 90th birthday) [Trespassing on Einstein's lawn: a father, a daughter, the meaning of nothing, and the beginning of everything, 2014, https://books.google.com/books?id=NUMkAAAAQBAJ]

“… we can afford many mistakes in the search. The main thing is to make as fast as possible.”

John Archibald Wheeler

As quoted by Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne, and Wojciech H. Zurek. "John Wheeler, relativity, and quantum information." https://authors.library.caltech.edu/15184/1/Misner2009p1638Phys_Today.pdf Physics Today 62, no. 4 (April 2009): 40–46 (quote from p. 44) [10.1063/1.3120895]

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

John Archibald Wheeler

Wheeler's succinct summary of Einstein's theory of general relativity, in Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam (2000), p. 235. http://books.google.com/books?id=zGFkK2tTXPsC&lpg=PA1&pg=PA235

John Archibald Wheeler Quotes about space

“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.”

John Archibald Wheeler

As quoted by Paul Davies, Other Worlds (1980)

“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?”

John Archibald Wheeler

"The Anthropic Universe" http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/the-anthropic-universe/3302686 (Feb 18, 2006) Australia's Science Show, with Martin Redfern moderating excerpts from several scientists, including Wheeler. Audio recording http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2006/02/ssw_20060218_1200.mp3 and transcript available. See also same show at WayBack Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20080616183602/http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1572643.htm Internet archive.org.

“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.”

John Archibald Wheeler Geons

[John Archibald Wheeler, Kenneth William Ford, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics‎, W. W. Norton & Company, 2000, 0393319911, 153]

“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.”

John Archibald Wheeler

As quoted in by Ken Wilber in Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists (2001) Shambhala, ISBN 1570627681.

“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 resistering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.”

John Archibald Wheeler

"Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links" in Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information (1990) ed., Wojciech H. Zurek, p. 5. http://books.google.com/books?id=mdjsOeTgatsC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA5

John Archibald Wheeler Quotes

“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.”

John Archibald Wheeler

John Archibald Wheeler, in "Albert Einstein in Biographical Memoirs Vol. 51, by the National Academy of Sciences

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

John Archibald Wheeler

Wheeler quoted this saying in Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information (1990), p. 10 http://books.google.com/books?id=mdjsOeTgatsC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA10#v=onepage&q&f=false, with a footnote attributing it to "graffiti in the men's room of the Pecan Street Cafe, Austin, Texas". Later publications, such as Paul Davies' 1995 book About Time (p. 236), credited Wheeler with variations of this saying, but the quip is actually much older. The earliest known source is Ray Cummings' 1922 science fiction novel The Girl in the Golden Atom, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21094 Ch. V: " 'Time,' he said, 'is what keeps everything from happening at once.' " It also appears in his 1929 novel The Man Who Mastered Time. http://books.google.com/books?id=YdZEAAAAYAAJ&q=%22everything+from+happening+at+once%22#search_anchor The earliest known occurrence other than Cummings is from 1962 in Film Facts: Volume 5, p. 48 http://books.google.com/books?id=sr0vAQAAIAAJ&q=%22everything+from+happening+at+once%22.
Misattributed

Way , Nature , Time

“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.”

John Archibald Wheeler

"Albert Einstein" in Biographical Memoirs (1980) Vol. 51, National Academy of Sciences.

Beauty , Nature

“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.”

John Archibald Wheeler

"Hermann Weyl and the Unity of Knowledge" http://www.weylmann.com/wheeler.shtml, American Scientist (July-August 1986) Vol. 74, pp. 366-375. Reprinted in At Home in the Universe (1993), p. 171. http://books.google.com/books?id=w9BXAAAAYAAJ&q=%22hermann+weyl+and+the+unity+of+knowledge%22#search_anchor

Question , Time , Future

“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.”

John Archibald Wheeler

from a transcript of the video interview "Understanding Relativity," published at webofstories.com

Thinking , World , Idea

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