Top 32 Quotes & Sayings by John Archibald Wheeler
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American physicist John Archibald Wheeler.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.
To hate is to study, to study is to understand, to understand is to appreciate, to appreciate is to love. So maybe I'll end up loving your theory.
Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.
In order to more fully understand this reality, we must take into account other dimensions of a broader reality.
We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
It is my opinion that everything must be based on a simple idea. And it is my opinion that this idea, once we have finally discovered it, will be so compelling, so beautiful, that we will say to one another, yes, how could it have been any different.
Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium - we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? How could we have been so stupid?
Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once.
In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.
If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day.
We will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.
The job of a theoretical physicist is to make mistakes as fast as possible .
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.
Now is the time for everyone who believes in the rule of reason to speak up against pathological science and its purveyors.
'Participant' is the incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics. It strikes down the '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 it...May the universe in some sense be 'brought into being' by the participation of those who participate?
We all know that the real reason universities have students is in order to educate the professors.
No space, no time, no gravity, no electromagnetism, no particles. Nothing. We are back where Plato, Aristotle and Parmenides struggled with the great questions: How Come the Universe, How Come Us, How Come Anything? But happily also we have around the answer to these questions. That's us.
Time, among all concepts in the world of physics, puts up the greatest resistance to being dethroned from ideal continuum to the world of the discrete, of information, of bits.... 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 ... is a task for the future.
The universe gives birth to consciousness, and consciousness gives meaning to the universe.
The laws of physics that we regard
as 'sacred,' as immutable, are anything
but.
Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.
Surely where there's smoke there's fire? No, where there's so much smoke there's smoke.
The observer cannot be left out of the description of the observation.
Every heat engineer knows he can design his heat engine reliably and accurately on the foundation of the second law [of thermodynamics]. Run alongside one of the molecules, however, and ask it what it thinks of the second law. It will laugh at us. It never heard of the second law. It does what it wants. All the same, a collection of billions upon billions of such molecules obeys the second law with all the accuracy one could want
One can only learn by teaching.
We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense this is aparticipatory universe.
It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom...an immaterial source and explanation...that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.
I like to think that someone will trace how the deepest thinking of India made its way to Greece and from there to the philosophy of our times
This is *our* Universe, our museum of wonder and beauty, our cathedral.
It was the defining event and remains a thousand degrees hot.
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.
I like to say, when asked why I pursue science, that it is to satisfy my curiosity, that I am by nature a searcher trying to understand. If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day.
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