John Archibald Wheeler

"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'."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"The first time I met Wheeler was in 1961, I was an undergraduate... with a somewhat unorthodox academic record. ...The hope was that ...I would be admitted as a graduate student... At the time I was working as a plumber... I was completely enthralled. John was enthusiastically describing his vision of how space and time would become a wild, jittery, foamy world of s when viewed through a tremendously powerful microscope. He told me that the most profound and exciting problem of physics was to unify Einstein's two great theories—General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. He explained that only at the Planck distance would elementary particles reveal their true nature, and it would be all about geometry—. To a young aspiring physicist, the stuffy businessman exterior had morphed into an idealistic visionary. I wanted more than anything to follow this man into battle."

"Some people think Wheeler's gotten crazy in his later years, but he's always been crazy."

"The late, great astrophysicist, philosopher and black hole evangelist John Archibald Wheeler, of Princeton, used to say that the past and the future are fiction, that they only exist in the artifacts and the imaginations of the present."