John Archibald Wheeler Quotes

36 Sourced 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.

John Archibald Wheeler
Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.

John Archibald Wheeler
There is nothing in the world except empty curved space. Matter, charge, electromagnetism, and other fields are only manifestations of the curvature of space.

John Archibald Wheeler
I have great hesitation in trying to formulate some unifying concepts out of my own field, and still more reluctance in speaking about their application to other fields of human knowledge.

John Archibald Wheeler
There is no law except that there is no law.

John Archibald Wheeler
How can anyone learn anything new who does not find it a shock.

John Archibald Wheeler
Should we be prepared to see some day a new structure for the foundations of physics that does away with time? In Paul Davies

John Archibald Wheeler
Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.

John Archibald Wheeler
Time ends. That is the lesson of the "big bang." It is also the lesson of the black hole.

John Archibald Wheeler
Only by the analysis and interpretation of observations as they are made, and the examination of the larger implications of the results, is one in a satisfactory position to pose new experimental and theoretical questions of the greatest significance.

John Archibald Wheeler
The universe came into being in a big bang, before which, Einstein's theory instructs us, there was no before. Not only particles and fields of force had to come into being at the big bang, but the laws of physics themselves, and this by a process as higgledy-piggledy as genetic mutation or the second law of thermodynamics.

John Archibald Wheeler
The beauty in the laws of physics is the fantastic simplicity that they have.

John Archibald Wheeler
There is an age-old longing to understand the inner mystery of this strange and beautiful world of ours and our own little place in the scheme of things. Whoever knows a little and can give a little to the search wants to know more and give more.

John Archibald Wheeler
One feels that one has, at last in gravitational collapse, a phenomenon where general relativity dramatically comes into its own, and where its fiery marriage with quantum physics will be consummated.

John Archibald Wheeler
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
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
As we make our way into the world of tomorrow, with its endless frontiers and its opportunities for a deeper and richer civilization than ever before, we will meet and overcome many a new risk. But we know that the greatest risk of all is what it always has been — to be born — for then we are sure to die.

John Archibald Wheeler
The physicist does not have the habit of giving up something unless he gets something better in return.

John Archibald Wheeler
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
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."

John Archibald Wheeler
If one really understood the central point and its necessity in the construction of the world, one ought to be able to state it in one clear, simple sentence. Until we see the quantum principle with this simplicity we can well believe that we do not know the first thing about the universe, about ourselves, and about our place in the universe.

John Archibald Wheeler
The pursuit of science is more than the pursuit of understanding. It is driven by the creative urge, the urge to construct a vision, a map, a picture of the world that gives the world a little more beauty and coherence than it had before.

John Archibald Wheeler
The quantum is the crack in the armor that covers the secret of existence.

John Archibald Wheeler
The black hole] teaches us that space can be crumpled like a piece of paper into an infinitesimal dot, that time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as 'sacred,' as immutable, are anything but.

John Archibald Wheeler
The reactor... had to contain material to decelerate the neutrons. Fermi, in his straightforward way, called this material a "slower downer". That term got under my skin so much that I was forced to think up a different term. I chose "moderator" and it stuck.

John Archibald Wheeler