{"id":9145,"date":"2024-10-22T19:06:32","date_gmt":"2024-10-22T23:06:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/legendary-physicist-john-archibald-wheeler-on-death-and-the-life-force-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-10-22T19:06:32","modified_gmt":"2024-10-22T23:06:32","slug":"legendary-physicist-john-archibald-wheeler-on-death-and-the-life-force-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/legendary-physicist-john-archibald-wheeler-on-death-and-the-life-force-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Legendary Physicist John Archibald Wheeler on Death and the Life-Force \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"Everything<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cTo die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,\u201d Walt Whitman writes in the prime of life. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat happens when you get to the end of things?\u201d four-year-old Johnny in Ohio asks<\/a> his mother from the bathtub while Whitman\u2019s borrowed atoms are becoming young grass in a New Jersey cemetery. <\/p>\n

In his lifetime of nearly a century, John Archibald Wheeler<\/strong> (July 9, 1911\u2013April 13, 2008) would go on revolutionize physics by posing this question to reality itself, emerging as a bridge figure between the world of relativity and the quantum world. The student of one Nobel laureate (Niels Bohr<\/a>) and the teacher of another (Kip Thorne<\/a>), he walked with Albert Einstein, shaped Stephen Hawking\u2019s ideas about the singularity<\/a>, and coined the term black hole<\/em><\/a>. Four centuries after Leibniz launched the information age by developing binary arithmetic<\/a> \u2014 the underlying logic of 1s and 0s, of yeses and nos, that constitutes all information \u2014 Wheeler posited that, at the fundamental level, reality is made of two things only: binary choices and a chooser. \u201cAll things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe,\u201d he wrote in his brilliant and brilliantly titled It from Bit<\/em><\/a> theory. \u201cObserver-participancy gives rise to information.\u201d That he never received a Nobel Prize is a testament to Wheeler\u2019s animating spirit \u2014 he was interested not in the answers for which it is awarded but in the questions that quicken the mind with participancy in the universe. Questions like what happens at the end \u2014 of space and time, of mass and energy, of life.<\/p>\n

\"\"
John Archibald Wheeler across life<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The year he turned seventy, Wheeler became one of the artists and scientists whom Viennese psychologist Lisl M. Goodman, then in her early thirties, interviewed for her fascinating out-of-print book Death and the Creative Life<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 vibrant and overt affirmation of the elemental fact that all creative work, be it a theorem or a poem, is our best instrument for wresting meaning from our transient lives, the best way we have of bearing our mortality. <\/p>\n

Wheeler addresses this directly when asked why he does what he does:<\/p>\n

\n

To understand why we are here. The universe without any consciousness would not be the universe. We haven\u2019t found the meaning, but there must be one. These questions, about life and about death, are the most important to me.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In consonance with Whitman\u2019s proclamation that \u201cwhat invigorates life invigorates death,\u201d Wheeler adds:<\/p>\n

\n

Life without death is meaningless. It\u2019s like a picture without a frame. Death gives value to life. More than that, without death there is no life.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Half a century after Rilke insisted that \u201cdeath is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,\u201d<\/a> Wheeler considers the irrepressible vitality of the living here-and-now, the throbbing atom of eternity that is each passing moment, which would go pulseless if it were to become permanent:<\/p>\n

\n

Life is more important than the ones who do the living\u2026 All the preciousness and meaning of life would be drained away if one could go on living forever.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Citing his love of Emily Dickinson \u2014 who wrote beautifully about \u201cthe drift called the infinite,\u201d<\/a> and who died at the peak of her powers \u2014 he auguries:<\/p>\n

\n

By understanding death better we will understand life better.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps death so fascinated Wheeler because it is the starkest subset of his greatest scientific obsession: time. Death is life having run out of time, the event horizon past which all happening ceases for the living observer. But in Wheeler\u2019s physics, nothing happens at all \u2014 everything has already happened and is always happening, and past and present are not a function of time but of the observer\u2019s vantage. \u201cNo phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon,\u201d Wheeler wrote three years earlier with an eye to the famous double-slit experiments demonstrating how profoundly the quantum world violates our basic intuitions about reality:<\/p>\n

\n

It is not a paradox that we choose what shall have happened after it has already happened [because] it has not really happened, it is not a phenomenon, until it is an observed phenomenon.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At the peak of his ninety-seventh spring, death observed Wheeler and everything continued to happen, not happening at all. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\u201cThoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death.\u201d<\/em> Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare English edition<\/a> of Walt Whitman\u2019s Leaves of Grass<\/em>. (Available as a print<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Couple with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on what happens when we die<\/a>, then revisit the mathematical prodigy William James Sidis, writing when Wheeler was still a boy, on how the quantum undoing of time and thermodynamics changes life and death<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cTo die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,\u201d Walt Whitman writes in the prime of life. \u201cWhat happens when you get to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9146,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9145\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}