John Wheeler Quotes

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

If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of a day. –JOHN WHEELER

In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.

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

The universe gives birth to consciousness, and consciousness gives meaning to the universe.

Knowledge only progresses by making mistakes as fast as possible.

Yes, there is happiness to be found in the mere contemplation of the deepest mysteries.

As the physicist John Wheeler said, “If you don’t kick things around with people, you are out of it. Nobody, I always say, can be anybody without somebody being around.

The beautiful thing about driving was that it stole just enough of his attention - car parked on the side, maybe a cop, slow to speed limit, time to pass this sixteen-wheeler, turn signal, check rearview, crane neck to check blind spot and yes, okay, left lane.

A pleasant morning. Saw my classmates Gardner, and Wheeler. Wheeler dined, spent the afternoon, and drank Tea with me. Supped at Major Gardiners, and engag'd to keep School at Bristol, provided Worcester People, at their ensuing March meeting, should change this into a moving School, not otherwise. Major Greene this Evening fell into some conversation with me about the Divinity and Satisfaction of Jesus Christ. All the Argument he advanced was, 'that a mere creature, or finite Being, could not make Satisfaction to infinite justice, for any Crimes,' and that 'these things are very mysterious.' (Thus mystery is made a convenient Cover for absurdity.) [Diary entry, February 13 1756]

If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day.

Spacetime grips mass, telling it how to move... Mass grips spacetime, telling it how to curve

Never make a calculation until you know the answer. Make an estimate before every calculation, try a simple physical argument (symmetry! invariance! conservation!) before every derivation, guess the answer to every paradox and puzzle. Courage: No one else needs to know what the guess is. Therefore make it quickly, by instinct. A right guess reinforces this instinct. A wrong guess brings the refreshment of surprise. In either case life as a spacetime expert, however long, is more fun!

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.

Spacetime grips mass, telling it how to move... Mass grips spacetime, telling it how to curve

Matter tells Spacetime how to curve, and Spacetime tells matter how to move.

Individual events. Events beyond law. Events so numerous and so uncoordinated that, flaunting their freedom from formula, they yet fabricate firm form.

Nobody can be anybody without somebodies around.

Of course. Of course Shara gave her this instead of an explanation. Of course Shara cast herself as the main character of her own personal John Green novel.

Anyone who expects to create, be it as a scientist or artist, scholar or writer, needs self-confidence, even bravado. How else can one dare to imagine understanding what no one else has understood, discovering what no one else has discovered? Where does this confidence come from? Fortunately, every young person is blessed with some of it. It is part of human character.

Never make a calculation until you know the answer.

If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of a day. —JOHN WHEELER

the physicist John Wheeler once calculated that if one took all the heavy water in all the oceans of the world, one could build a hydrogen bomb that would compress matter at the center so much that a black hole would be created. (Of course, there would be no one left to observe it!)

the past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present. (...) we would seem forced to say that no phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon. The universe does not 'exist, out there' independent of all acts of observation. Instead, it is in some strange sense a participatory universe

The human mind is woven into the energy fabric of the universe. John A. Wheeler

But some numbers, called dimensionless numbers, have the same numerical value no matter what units of measurement are chosen. Probably the most famous of these is the "fine-structure constant," .... Physicists love this number not just because it is dimensionless, but also because it is a combination of three fundamental constants of nature.

Quantum physicist John Wheeler expressed it this way, when discussing the search for the clockwork mechanism that runs the world, "There may be no such thing as the 'glittering central mechanism of the universe' to be seen behind a glass wall at the end of the trail. Not machinery but magic may be the better description of the treasure that is waiting.

Matter tells space-time how to curve. Space-time tells matter how to move.

What we call the past is built on bits.

There is nothing in the world except empty curved space. Matter, charge, electromagnetism, and other fields are only manifestations of the bending of space. Physics is geometry.

To be is to be perceived.

Back in 1926, German physicist Max Born demonstrated that quantum waves are waves of probability, not waves of material, as his colleague Schrödinger had theorized. They are statistical predictions. Thus, a wave of probability is nothing but a likely outcome. In fact, outside of that idea, the wave is not there! It’s intangible. As Nobel physicist John Wheeler once said, “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.

El físico teórico estadounidense del siglo XX John Archibald Wheeler lo expresó de mejor forma, resumiendo el concepto de Einstein como: “La materia le dice al espacio cómo curvarse; el espacio la dice a la materia cómo moverse”.4

Physicists love this number not just because it is dimensionless, but also because it is a combination of three fundamental constants of nature. Why do these constants come together to make the particular number 1/137.036 and not some other number?

This ether is a source of tremendous energy that is in constant motion, flowing in and out of all objects in the universe—just as a candle flame is constantly absorbing new wax and oxygen and radiating new heat and light, but still continues to exist as a measurable unit.” Wilcox also tells us, “[P]hysicists John Wheeler and Richard Feynman have calculated that the energy in the volume of vacuum space contained within a single light bulb is concentrated enough to bring all the world’s oceans to the boiling point!”2

Quantum physics tells us that no matter how thorough our observation of the present, the (unobserved) past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. The universe, according to quantum physics, has no single past, or history. The fact that the past takes no definite form means that observations you make on a system in the present affect its past. That is underlined rather dramatically by a type of experiment thought up by physicist John Wheeler, called a delayed-choice experiment. Schematically, a delayed-choice experiment is like the double-slit experiment we just described, in which you have the option of observing the path that the particle takes, except in the delayed-choice experiment you postpone your decision about whether or not to observe the path until just before the particle hits the detection screen. Delayed-choice experiments result in data identical to those we get when we choose to observe (or not observe) the which-path information by watching the slits themselves. But in this case the path each particle takes—that is, its past—is determined long after it passed through the slits and presumably had to “decide” whether to travel through just one slit, which does not produce interference, or both slits, which does. Wheeler even considered a cosmic version of the experiment, in which the particles involved are photons emitted by powerful quasars billions of light-years away. Such light could be split into two paths and refocused toward earth by the gravitational lensing of an intervening galaxy. Though the experiment is beyond the reach of current technology, if we could collect enough photons from this light, they ought to form an interference pattern. Yet if we place a device to measure which-path information shortly before detection, that pattern should disappear. The choice whether to take one or both paths in this case would have been made billions of years ago, before the earth or perhaps even our sun was formed, and yet with our observation in the laboratory we will be affecting that choice. In

As scientists would discover after Einstein’s death, Schwarzschild’s odd theory was right. Stars could collapse and create such a phenomenon, and in fact they often did. In the 1960s, physicists such as Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, John Wheeler, Freeman Dyson, and Kip Thorne showed that this was indeed a feature of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, one that was very real. Wheeler dubbed them “black holes,” and they have been a feature of cosmology, as well as Star Trek episodes, ever since.3 Black holes have now been discovered all over the universe, including one at the center of our galaxy that is a few million times more massive than our sun. “Black holes are not rare, and they are not an accidental embellishment of our universe,” says Dyson. “They are the only places in the universe where Einstein’s theory of relativity shows its full power and glory. Here, and nowhere else, space and time lose their individuality and merge together in a sharply curved four-dimensional structure precisely delineated by Einstein’s equations.”4 Einstein

The entropy of the hot radiation she observes as a result of her acceleration turns out to be exactly proportional to the area of her horizon! This relationship between the area of a horizon and entropy was discovered by a Ph.D. student named Jacob Bekenstein, who was working at Princeton at about the time that Bill Unruh made his great discovery. Both were students of John Wheeler who a few years before had given the black hole its name. Bekenstein and Unruh were in a long line of remarkable students Wheeler trained, which included Richard Feynman.

Several of the new proposals have at their core the concept that the world is made of information. This can be summarized in John Wheeler’s slogan “it from bit,” modernized as “it from qubit,” where a qubit is a minimal unit of quantum information, i.e., a quantum binary choice, as in our story about pet preference. In practical terms, this program imagines that all physical quantities are reducible to a finite number of quantum yes/no questions, and also that evolution in time under Rule 1 can be understood as processing this quantum information as a quantum computer would.

Eminent Princeton physicist John Wheeler has for years been insisting that when observing light from a distant quasar that’s bent around a foreground galaxy so that it had the possibility of appearing on either side of that city of suns, we have effectively set up a quantum observation but on an enormously large scale. It means, he insists, that the measurements made on an incoming bit of light now determine the indeterminate path it took billions of years ago. The past is created in the present. This of course recalls the actual quantum experiments outlined in our earlier chapters, where an observation right now determines the path its twin took in the past.

Recent decades have taught us that physics is a magic window. It shows us the illusion that lies behind reality—and the reality that lies behind illusion. Its scope is immensely greater than we one realized. We are no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, or fields of force, or geometry, or even space and time. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself.

We have established on thermodynamic grounds that to make a cell from scratch requires a continuous flow of reactive carbon and chemical energy across rudimentary catalysts in a constrained through-flow system. Only hydrothermal vents provide the requisite conditions, and only a subset of vents – alkaline hydrothermal vents – match all the conditions needed. But alkaline vents come with both a serious problem and a beautiful answer to the problem. The serious problem is that these vents are rich in hydrogen gas, but hydrogen will not react with CO2 to form organics. The beautiful answer is that the physical structure of alkaline vents – natural proton gradients across thin semiconducting walls – will (theoretically) drive the formation of organics. And then concentrate them. To my mind, at least, all this makes a great deal of sense. Add to this the fact that all life on earth uses (still uses!) proton gradients across membranes to drive both carbon and energy metabolism, and I’m tempted to cry, with the physicist John Archibald Wheeler, ‘Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind for so long!’ Let

Rμv– 1/2 gμv R = 8πTμv The left side of the equation starts with the term Rμv, which is the Ricci tensor he had embraced earlier. The term gμv is the all-important metric tensor, and the term R is the trace of the Ricci tensor called the Ricci scalar. Together, this left side of the equation—which is now known as the Einstein tensor and can be written simply as Gμv—compresses together all of the information about how the geometry of spacetime is warped and curved by objects. The right side describes the movement of matter in the gravitational field. The interplay between the two sides shows how objects curve spacetime and how, in turn, this curvature affects the motion of objects. As the physicist John Wheeler has put it, “Matter tells spacetime how to curve, and curved space tells matter how to move.”83 Thus is staged a cosmic tango, as captured by another physicist, Brian Greene: Space and time become players in the evolving cosmos. They come alive. Matter here causes space to warp there, which causes matter over here to move, which causes space way over there to warp even more, and so on. General relativity provides the choreography for an entwined cosmic dance of space, time, matter, and energy.84 At

On his journey home from delivering his acceptance speech in Sweden the following summer, Einstein stopped in Copenhagen to see Bohr, who met him at the train station to take him home by streetcar. On the ride, they got into a debate. “We took the streetcar and talked so animatedly that we went much too far,” Bohr recalled. “We got off and traveled back, but again rode too far.” Neither seemed to mind, for the conversation was so engrossing. “We rode to and fro,” according to Bohr, “and I can well imagine what the people thought about us.”43 More than just a friendship, their relationship became an intellectual entanglement that began with divergent views about quantum mechanics but then expanded into related issues of science, knowledge, and philosophy. “In all the history of human thought, there is no greater dialogue than that which took place over the years between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein about the meaning of the quantum,” says the physicist John Wheeler, who studied under Bohr. The social philosopher C. P. Snow went further. “No more profound intellectual debate has ever been conducted,” he proclaimed.44 Their dispute went to the fundamental heart of the design of the cosmos: Was there an objective reality that existed whether or not we could ever observe it? Were there laws that restored strict causality to phenomena that seemed inherently random? Was everything in the universe predetermined?

The result was not nearly as vivid to the layman as, say, E=mc2. Yet using the condensed notations of tensors, in which sprawling complexities can be compressed into little subscripts, the crux of the final Einstein field equations is compact enough to be emblazoned, as it indeed often has been, on T-shirts designed for proud physics students. In one of its many variations,82 it can be written as: Rμv– 1/2 gμv R = 8πTμv The left side of the equation starts with the term Rμv, which is the Ricci tensor he had embraced earlier. The term gμv is the all-important metric tensor, and the term R is the trace of the Ricci tensor called the Ricci scalar. Together, this left side of the equation—which is now known as the Einstein tensor and can be written simply as Gμv—compresses together all of the information about how the geometry of spacetime is warped and curved by objects. The right side describes the movement of matter in the gravitational field. The interplay between the two sides shows how objects curve spacetime and how, in turn, this curvature affects the motion of objects. As the physicist John Wheeler has put it, “Matter tells spacetime how to curve, and curved space tells matter how to move.”83 Thus is staged a cosmic tango, as captured by another physicist, Brian Greene: Space and time become players in the evolving cosmos. They come alive. Matter here causes space to warp there, which causes matter over here to move, which causes space way over there to warp even more, and so on. General relativity provides the choreography for an entwined cosmic dance of space, time, matter, and energy.

She liked seeing John smile. He was usually so serious and guarded. The flash of boyish teasing warmed her heart. She’d liked the faintly possessive stamp of that kiss, too. Although she’d never imagined she would enjoy any man showing possessive tendencies around her again, there was something healthy and respectful, and completely new about the way John liked to hold her hands or take her arm, to subtly touch her—or kiss her. It was like falling in love for the first time all over again. He made her feel important. He listened. He got angry…on her behalf. John made her feel like a woman worth caring about, not a punching bag or vessel for sex or thing a man owned the way Danny had. He made her believe that with the right man—with John himself, perhaps—that it was okay for her to love again. - (Maggie)

I thundered hot water into the big tub, setting up McGee's Handy Home Treatment for Melancholy. A deep hot bath, and a strong cold drink, and a book on the tub rack. Who needs the Megrims? Surely not McGee, not that big brown loose-jointed, wirehaired beach rambler, that lazy fishcatching, girlwatching, grey-eyed iconoclastic hustler. Stay happy, McGee, while you use up the stockpiled cash. Borrow a Junior from Meyer for the sake of coziness. Or get dressed and go over to the next doc, over to the big Wheeler where the Alabama Tiger maintains his permanent floating house party and join the festive pack. Do anything, but stop remembering the way Sam Taggart looks with all the wandering burned out of him. Stop remembering the sly shy way Nicki would walk toward you, across a room. Stop remembering the way Lois died. Get in there and have fun, fella. While there's fun to have. While there's some left. Before they deal you out.

There is reason to believe that, to some extent at least, the physical universe is actually ‘constructed’ by the intervention of the physicist, which is the reason John Wheeler refers to it as ‘the participatory universe’, and why Heisenberg states that physics deals, not with Nature as such, but with ‘our relations to Nature’.

It is no coincidence that Rudyard Kipling’s first novel, and other books, The Story of the Gadsbys, The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales, and Wee Willie Winkie and Other Stories, In Black and White, et al, were published under Wheeler’s Railway Library Series. The books were illustrated by his father, John Lockwood Kipling. Kipling was not French, but became equally popular. He was sensational in his own way of fancying militarism and hierarchy.

Correct it may be, but at its core quantum physics departs from classical physics in a very discomfiting way. Integral to quantum physics is the fundamental role played by the observer in choosing which of a plenitude of possible realities will leave the realm of the possible and become actual. For at its core, quantum physics challenges the ontology that permeated the scientific enterprise for centuries, the premise that a real world—independent of human choice and interference—is out there, uninfluenced by our observation of it. Quantum physics makes the seemingly preposterous claim (actually, more than claim, since it has been upheld in countless experiments) that there is no “is” until an observer makes an observation. Quantum phenomena seem to be called into existence by the very questions we ask nature, existing until then in an undefined fuzzy state. This feature of the quantum world led the American physicist John Archibald Wheeler to say that the world comes into being through our knowledge of it—or, as Wheeler put it, we get “its from bits” (bits of knowledge).

circumstances determine our lives, but we shape our lives by what we make of our circumstances.

THE PREDESTINED In 1856, William Walker proclaims himself president of Nicaragua. The ceremony includes speeches, a military parade, a mass, and a banquet featuring fifty-three toasts of European wines. A week later, United States Ambassador John H. Wheeler officially recognizes the new president, and his speech compares him to Christopher Columbus. Walker imposes Louisiana’s constitution on Nicaragua, reestablishing slavery, abolished in all Central America thirty years previous. He does so for the good of the blacks, because “inferior races cannot compete with the white race, unless they are given a white master to channel their energies.” This Tennessee gentleman known as “the Predestined” receives orders directly from God.

According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, it is the observer who both decides which aspect of nature is to be probed and reads the answer nature gives. The mind of the observer helps choose which of an uncountable number of possible realities comes into being in the form of observations. A specific question (Is the electron here or there?) has been asked, and an observation has been performed (Aha! the electron is there!), corralling an unruly wave of probability into a well-behaved quantum of certainty. Bohr was silent on how observation performs this magic. It seems, though, as if registering the observation in the mind of the observer somehow turns the trick: the mental event collapses the wave function. Bohr, squirming under the implications of his own work, resisted the idea that an observer, through observation, is actually influencing the course of physical events outside his body. Others had no such qualms. As the late physicist Heinz Pagels wrote in his wonderful 1982 book The Cosmic Code, “There is no meaning to the objective existence of an electron at some point in space… independent of any actual observation. The electron seems to spring into existence as a real object only when we observe it!” Physical theory thus underwent a tectonic shift, from a theory about physical reality to a theory about our knowledge. Science is what we know, and what we know is only what our observations tell us. It is unscientific to ask what is “really” out there, what lies behind the observations. Physical laws as embodied in the equations of quantum physics, then, ceased describing the physical world itself. They described, instead, our knowledge of that world. Physics shifted from an ontological goal—learning what is—to an epistemological one: determining what is known, or knowable. As John Archibald Wheeler cracked, “No phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” The notion that the wave function collapses when the mind of an observer registers a new bit of knowledge was developed by the physicist Eugene Wigner, who proposed a model of how consciousness might collapse the wave function—something we will return to. But why human consciousness should be thus privileged has remained an enigma and a source of deep division in physics right down to today.

As the great physicist John Wheeler said: "To my mind there must be, at the bottom of it all, not an equation, but an utterly simple idea. And to me that idea, when we finally discover it, will be so compelling, so inevitable, that we will say to one another: 'Oh, how beautiful. How could it have been otherwise?

One thing he knew for sure. When he saw that useless nephew of his, he was going to have to tell him just how lucky he had been. Wheeler

However, as Takara was hoisted up and out of the pool and loaded into the box on the back of an 18-wheeler, her mother began to emit continuous vocalizations, sounds that had never been heard from her in the three decades of her captivity.

The most commonly quoted mass for the vacuum is 1094 grams per centimeter cubed (g/cm3) as calculated by John Wheeler who was quoted above.11 We will calculate later that the energy of the vacuum is 1095 g/cm3 by a slightly different method, so that value will be used from here on. As we will see, one order of magnitude difference is not that significant at this point in our discussions. Energy is related to mass by the well-known relation E=mc2. For comparison water has a mass density of 1 g/cm3 by definition. It is impossible for most normal people to grasp just how big a difference in energy there is between the zero-point field and water, so perhaps a simple illustrative example will help. Let’s start with the clichéd drop in a bucket. If the drop is one milliliter (1 ml) and the bucket 100 liters (72.5 gallons), then that gives us a factor of 105. If instead we consider a drop in all the Earth’s oceans, then we have a factor of 1024. That is a lot bigger than a bucket but nowhere close to how insignificant the mass of the drop of water is when compared to zero-point energy. To continue, what if the ocean was the size of the sun? That gives us a ratio on the order of 1041, which is still a long way off. If the ocean was the size of the solar system we get a ratio on the order of 1050. Now if we expand the ocean to the size of the galaxy we get ~1076 and we are still not anywhere close. What if the ocean is the size of the known visible universe? Assuming a radius of 7.4 x 1026 meters the mass ratio is 5 x 1095. There we go. So, the density of water compared to the energy of the vacuum is equivalent to five 1 ml drops of water in an ocean the size of the visible universe. Since we are mostly water and have a similar density to water, the vacuum fluctuations inside our body are like having all the mass-energy of an ocean of water the size of the universe inside each little part of us. Wow, we are pretty insignificant in the big scheme of things and so is any other body of solid matter or any amount of energy associated with it. This zero-point energy is all around us and all throughout us. We are lucky that zero-point energy is not detectable or anything we did would be undetectable noise to any sensor we could possibly make. Even worse, if we could absorb even a small fraction of that energy, we would be vaporized in an instant. Or, if all that energy participated in a gravitational force, the universe would be crushed to a speck.

It is said that when the historian John Wheeler-Bennett came to write the official biography of King George VI, the Queen Mother asked him to tone down the many references to her influence on her husband.

Royal reaction to the British publication of the book was draconian. Crawfie had to leave her grace-and-favour cottage; her entry in Who’s Who was withdrawn; her name was not even mentioned in officially authorized biographies such as John Wheeler-Bennett’s King George VI or Dorothy Laird’s Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. She retired to Aberdeen from where, with extraordinary insensitivity, she pestered the family with frequent requests.

What we call the past is built on bits. —John Archibald Wheeler

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

can describe as existing—from the perspective of what we can interact with and measure—is the software of reality, the interactions that make objects or allow us to observe their existence. This opens a possible resolution where we must treat matter itself as information, which forces reconsidering our concept of what is material. In some ways we are reenvisioning what the quantum physicist John Wheeler envisaged with his famous dictum, “It from bit,” where his “bit” refers to the measurement of information. However, what I am claiming here is that if we adopt John’s “it from bit,” the most interesting feature is not that what we call reality arises from the posing of yes/no questions and the registration of measurement-evoked information theoretic responses to them, as John claimed (where 1 bit is required to measure the answer to a yes/no question). Instead, what I am suggesting is that what we call the future is constructed by those responses.

Except in cases where he had pledged his word, Hitler always meant what he said

Al crecer nuestra isla de conocimiento, crece también la playa de nuestra ignorancia.1 JOHN A. WHEELER

They discussed the long, thorough theoretical paper by Niels Bohr and John Wheeler, “The mechanism of nuclear fission,” that had been published in the September Physical Review and especially its conclusion, which Bohr and Wheeler had elaborated from Bohr’s Sunday-morning graph work, that U235 was probably the isotope of uranium responsible for slow-neutron fission.1205

Dr. John Archibald Wheeler, called the father of the hydrogen bomb in some circles (others attribute paternity in that regrettable case to Dr. Edward Teller) has repeatedly urged that the simplest, most honest explanation of quantum paradoxes holds that the known universe results from the observations of those who observe it. This "observer-created universe" bears an uncanny resemblance to some of our data about "self-fulfilling prophecies," it begins to appear.

For instance, the illustration at the beginning of Chapter One — which you can see as a young woman or as an old lady — demonstrates a fundamental discovery of perception psychology. This discovery appears in many different formulations, in various books, but the simplest and most general statement of it, I think, goes like this: perception does not consist of passive reception of signals but of an active interpretation of signals. (Or: perception doesn't consist of passive re-actions but of active, creative trans-actions.) The same law appears, in quantum theory, in different words, but most commonly physicists state it as "the observer cannot be left out of the description of the observation." (Dr. John A. Wheeler goes further and says the observer "creates" the universe of observation.) I will endeavor to show that the similarity of these principles derives from a deeper similarity that unites Quantum Mechanics and neuroscience with each other (and with certain aspects of Oriental philosophy).

The great breakthrough of Einstein’s work is his assertion that gravitational attraction comes not as an external law imposed on the universe but from the objects themselves. Though the mathematical equations are complex, the interpretation is straightforward. Space is imagined as malleable, and matter is pictured as having the power to bend, dent, and curve space. A two-dimensional analogy would be a vast plain made of a rubbery material upon which various objects like stars and galaxies rested. A single star would make a dent in the rubber surface, a single galaxy would make a deeper dent, and a cluster of galaxies would make an even deeper dent in this imagined surface. In this way each of these objects was a creator of gravity. Einstein’s theory asserts that objects move along geodesic pathways that are determined by the curvature of this rubbery surface. If a rolling marble happens upon a dent in the surface, it will roll downhill toward whatever is causing the dent. If the marble happens to be moving quickly, it will slide toward the bottom of the dent but will have enough speed to carry it up and out of the indentation. Applied to my situation there at the lip of the Fraser River in British Columbia, my rock was sliding down to Earth because of the dent Earth made in the rubbery fabric of four-dimensional space-time. This cosmological dynamic received a succinct summary by John Archibald Wheeler, one of the main developers of Einstein’s theory, who said, “Matter tells space-time how to curve and curved space-time tells matter how to move.” The precision of prediction is astonishing. By plugging into Einstein’s field equations the values for the mass of my rock and of Earth, one can predict with highest accuracy the pathway the rock travels when released. Einstein’s work holds not only for the movements of rocks dropped on Earth, but for planets revolving around the Sun, for the Sun revolving around the Milky Way galaxy, for the Milky Way pinwheeling about Andromeda, and for the Virgo supercluster of galaxies soaring through

Last but not least is the patrol afternoon watch. From left to right are the following: (first row) Sgt. Scott Margolin, Bob Picker, Jeff Woods, Al Tucker, Andy Conahan, and Juan Delvalle; (second row) Steve Andrews, Mike Wheeler, Chester Pitts, Bob Bowman, Bruce Bott, Kevin Taualii, Marty Dempsey, and Steve D’Anjou.

Broadway

The first variation is called the delayed-choice experiment and was suggested in 1980 by the eminent physicist John Wheeler. The experiment brushes up against an eerily odd-sounding question: Does the past depend on the future?

We formed the idea for what is now Fearless Faith Ministries that day over lunch. We chose the name because Beth had faced death fearlessly. Today, we have a relatively large following on our Facebook page @FFM60. The name of the page is Fearless Faith Ministries. The three of us take turns delivering three-minute messages every morning. We call these messages “Your Morning Cup of Inspiration.” Fearless Faith is a nonprofit 501(c) 3 corporation. A portion of the proceeds from this book will help us continue to minister in exciting new ways, as do the donations from our supporters and followers. God continues to open other doors of ministry to us, including radio and television. Our primary goal is to point people to Jesus. We believe that He is the answer to the problems that plague humanity today. We are not about religion. Jesus condemned the religious leaders of his time for their hypocrisy. He said they were “whited sepulchers,” meaning that they were all cleaned up on the outside, but they were dead on the inside. Fearless Faith is about spreading the gospel, or the Good News, that we can have a relationship with God. Our central message is that anyone can have eternal life by simply asking God to forgive their sins and by accepting the gift of atonement that Jesus provided through his death and resurrection. We believe that Jesus is “the way, the truth and the life” as He said in John 14:6, King James Version of the Bible.

As Keeper of the Royal Archives (1943–53), Lascelles sanctioned official biographies of George V by Harold Nicolson, Queen Mary by James Pope-Hennessy, and George VI by John Wheeler-Bennett.

From John Haines: You can kill off the original inhabitants, most of the world’s wildlife, and still live on the land…but a sure poverty will follow us, an inner desolation to match the devastation without. And having rid the earth of wilderness, of wild things generally, we look to outer space , to other planets, to find their replacements there…the prospect of an Alaska in which a million or so people are on the prowl with guns, snow machines, airboats, and four-wheelers is not only terrifying, it is finally unacceptable. An environmental ethic, believed in, practiced and enforce, is not just an alternative, it is the only one,…and it is sometimes possible to sense a genuine urge toward…a sane kind of plenitude, a fullness of spirit and being.

As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.

The question is what is the question?

WE ARE THE ARTISTS AS WELL AS THE ART As far-fetched as this idea may sound to many people, it is precisely at the crux of some of the greatest controversies among some of the most brilliant minds in recent history. In a quote from his autobiographical notes, for example, Albert Einstein shared his belief that we’re essentially passive observers living in a universe already in place, one in which we seem to have little influence: “Out yonder there was this huge world,” he said, “which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking.”2 In contrast to Einstein’s perspective, which is still widely held by many scientists today, John Wheeler, a Princeton physicist and colleague of Einstein, offers a radically different view of our role in creation. In terms that are bold, clear, and graphic, Wheeler says, “We had this old idea, that there was a universe out there, [author’s emphasis] and here is man, the observer, safely protected from the universe by a six-inch slab of plate glass.” Referring to the late-20th-century experiments that show us how simply looking at something changes that something, Wheeler continues, “Now we learn from the quantum world that even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron we have to shatter that plate glass: we have to reach in there…. So the old word observer simply has to be crossed off the books, and we must put in the new word participator.”3 What a shift! In a radically different interpretation of our relationship to the world we live in, Wheeler states that it’s impossible for us to simply watch the universe happen around us. Experiments in quantum physics, in fact, do show that simply looking at something as tiny as an electron—just focusing our awareness upon what it’s doing for even an instant in time—changes its properties while we’re watching it. The experiments suggest that the very act of observation is an act of creation, and that consciousness is doing the creating. These findings seem to support Wheeler’s proposition that we can no longer consider ourselves merely onlookers who have no effect on the world that we’re observing.

you would expect that at the ultimate base of Nature, we will surely find a principle which is simple, beautiful, and elegant. As the great physicist John Wheeler said: "To my mind there must be, at the bottom of it all, not an equation, but an utterly simple idea. And to me that idea, when we finally discover it, will be so compelling, so inevitable, that we will say to one another: 'Oh, how beautiful. How could it have been otherwise?