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
Nature at the quantum level is not a machine that goes its inexorable way. Instead what answer we get depends on the question we put, the experiment we arrange, the registering device we choose. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening.

John Archibald Wheeler
The human activity that we call science is not science unless it is the uncovering or discovery of something new.

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

John Archibald Wheeler
The vision of the Universe that is so vivid in our minds is framed by a few iron posts of true observation — themselves resting on theory for their meaning — but most of all the walls and towers in the vision are of papier-mâché, plastered in between those posts by an immense labor of imagination and theory.

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

John Archibald Wheeler
No point is more central than this, that empty space is not empty. It is the seat of the most violent physics.

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
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
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
Nothing is more important about quantum physics than this: it has destroyed the concept of the world as "sitting out there." The universe afterwards will never be the same.

John Archibald Wheeler
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.

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

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

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

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

John Archibald Wheeler
This is our universe, our museum of wonder and beauty, our cathedral.

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

John Archibald Wheeler