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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Quantum Mechanics
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Adapting from the earlier book Gravitation, I wrote, “Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.” In other words, a bit of matter (or mass, or energy) moves in accordance with the dictates of the curved spacetime where it is located. … At the same time, that bit of mass or energy is itself contributing to the curvature of spacetime everywhere.”
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. … [Consider if] the particles and their properties are not somehow related to making man possible. Man, the start of the analysis, man, the end of the analysis—because the physical world is, in some deep sense, tied to the human being.
If there’s one thing in physics I feel more responsible for than any other, it’s this perception of how everything fits together. I like to think of myself as having a sense of judgment. I’m willing to go anywhere, talk to anybody, ask any question that will make headway. I confess to being an optimist about things, especially about someday being able to understand how things are put together. So many young people are forced to specialize in one line or another that a young person can’t afford to try and cover this waterfront — only an old fogy who can afford to make a fool of himself. If I don't, who will?
“If this is what the McCarran Act means in practice, it seems to us a form of organized cultural suicide.” In a letter co-signed with his Princeton University physics professor colleagues, Walker Bleakney and Milton G. White, protesting that Nobel Prize-winning, Cambridge professor, Dirac having been invited for a year's visit to Princeton, had been denied a visa by the U.S. State Department under section 212A of the Immigration and Naturalization Act (McCarran Act). Quoting a report in Physics Today, this regulation includes 'categories of undesireables ranging from vagrants to stowaways.' The real reason remains unclear, but was perhaps related to Dirac's prior science-related visits to Russia. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance had recently been revoked, and this was the era of McCarthy's rabid anti-Communism hearings.
In any field find the strangest thing and then explore it.
In the fall of 1967, [I was invited] to a conference … on pulsars. … In my talk, I argued that we should consider the possibility that the center of a pulsar is a gravitationally completely collapsed object. I remarked that one couldn't keep saying “gravitationally completely collapsed object” over and over. One needed a shorter descriptive phrase. “How about black hole?” asked someone in the audience. I had been searching for the right term for months, mulling it over in bed, in the bathtub, in my car, whenever I had quiet moments. Suddenly this name seemed exactly right. When I gave a more formal Sigma Xi-Phi Beta Kappa lecture … on December 29, 1967, I used the term, and then included it in the written version of the lecture published in the spring of 1968. (As it turned out, a pulsar is powered by “merely” a neutron star, not a black hole.) [Although John Wheeler is often identified as coining the term “black hole,” he in fact merely popularized the expression. In his own words, this is his explanation of the true origin: a suggestion from an unidentified person in a conference audience.]
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?
No phenomenon is a physical phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.
No theory of physics that deals only with physics will ever explain physics. I believe that as we go on trying to understand the universe, we are at the same time trying to understand man.
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.
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.
Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.
The laws of physics must provide a mechanism for the universe to come into being.
The only thing harder to understand than a law of statistical origin would be a law that is not of statistical origin, for then there would be no way for it—or its progenitor principles—to come into being. On the other hand, when we view each of the laws of physics—and no laws are more magnificent in scope or better tested—as at bottom statistical in character, then we are at last able to forego the idea of a law that endures from everlasting to everlasting.
The Question is what is The Question? Is it all a Magic Show? Is Reality an Illusion? What is the framework of The Machine? Darwin’s Puzzle: Natural Selection? Where does Space-Time come from? Is there any answer except that it comes from consciousness? What is Out There? T’is Ourselves? Or, is IT all just a Magic Show? Einstein told me: “If you would learn, teach!” [Speaking at the American Physical Society, Philadelphia (Apr 2003).]
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.
The universe does not exist “out there,” independent of us. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening. We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense, this is a participatory universe. Physics is no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, fields of force, into geometry, or even into time and space. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself.
The vital act is the act of participation. “Participator” is the incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics. It strikes down the term “observer” of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. It can’t be done, quantum mechanics says.
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.
There is no law except the law that there is no law.
There is nothing in the world except empty curved space. Matter, charge, electromagnetism, and other fields are only manifestations of the curvature of space.
Those who know physicists and mountaineers know the traits they have in common: a “dream-and-drive” spirit, a bulldog tenacity of purpose, and an openness to try any route to the summit.
Time ends. That is the lesson of the “big bang”. It is also the lesson of the black hole, closer at hand and more immediate object of study. The black hole is a completely collapsed object. It is mass without matter. The Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland faded away leaving behind only its grin. A star that falls into an already existing black hole, or that collapses to make a new black hole, fades away. Of the star, of its matter and of its sunspots and solar prominences, all trace disappears. There remains behind only gravitational attraction, the attraction of disembodied mass.
Time is defined so that motion looks simple.
We live on an island of knowledge surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Wheeler’s First Moral Principle: 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!
You can talk about people like Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Confucius, but the thing that convinced me that such people existed were the conversations with Bohr.
[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.
For me, [John Wheeler] was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.— Max Tegmark
[John Wheeler] rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians — Freeman Dyson
The poetic Wheeler is a prophet, standing like Moses on the top of Mount Pisgah, looking out over the promised land that his people will one day inherit. — Freeman Dyson [Spoken at a 90th birthday celebration.]
Some people think Wheeler’s gotten crazy in his later years, but he’s always been crazy. — Richard P. Feynman
If this plane were to crash, we could get a new start on this quasar problem.
Wheeler hopes that we can discover, within the context of physics, a principle that will enable the universe to come into existence “of its own accord.” In his search for such a theory, he remarks: “No guiding principle would seem more powerful than the requirement that it should provide the universe with a way to come into being.” Wheeler likened this 'self-causing' universe to a self-excited circuit in electronics.
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