John Archibald Wheeler

John Archibald Wheeler (July 9, 1911 – April 13, 2008) was an eminent American theoretical physicist. One of the later collaborators of Albert Einstein, he tried to achieve Einstein's vision of a unified field theory. He is also known for having coined the terms black hole and wormhole and the phrase "it from bit".

Sourced

• 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, Kenneth William Ford (2000). Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics‎. W. W. Norton & Company. p. 153. ISBN 0393319911. 

• Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.
  • Wheeler's succinct summary of Einstein's theory of general relativity, in Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam, p. 235.

• 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.
  • From "Hermann Weyl and the Unity of Knowledge", American Scientist, Vol. 74, July-August 1986, pp. 366-375. Reprinted in At Home in the Universe (1993), p. 171.

• 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.
  • From the paper "Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links" which appeared in Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information edited by Wojciech H. Zurek (1990), p. 5.

Misattributed

• Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening all at once.
  • Wheeler did quote this saying in Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information, p. 10, and in the "references" section attributed it to "Atiyah, M. Collected Papers, Vol. 5: Gauge Theories. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988." Many later publication, such as Paul Davies' 1995 book About Time (p. 236), credited Wheeler with variations of this saying. In fact, this quip is much older; the earliest source located is Ray Cummings' 1922 science fiction novel The Girl in the Golden Atom, available on Project Gutenberg here (according to Science-Fiction: The Early Years by Everett F. Bleiler, p. 171, the novel was a composite of two earlier stories published in 1919 and 1920). Chapter V contains the following paragraph: The Big Business Man smiled. "Time," he said, "is what keeps everything from happening at once." The next-earliest source found for this quote is another book by Ray Cummings, The Man Who Mastered Time from 1929, and no published examples of the quote from authors other than Cummings can be found until the 1962 Film Facts: Volume 5 where it appears on p. 48. So, it seems likely that Ray Cummings is the real originator of this saying.