Frases de John Archibald Wheeler
John Archibald Wheeler
Fecha de nacimiento: 9. Julio 1911
Fecha de muerte: 13. Abril 2008
John Archibald Wheeler fue un físico teórico estadounidense. Se doctoró en la Universidad Johns Hopkins. Hizo importantes avances en la física teórica.
Entre sus trabajos importantes está la introducción de la matriz S que es indispensable en física de partículas. Además fue uno de los pioneros en la teoría de fisión nuclear.
Frases John Archibald Wheeler
„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
Scientific American (1992), Vol. 267.
„Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.“
— John Archibald Wheeler
Wheeler's succinct summary of Einstein's theory of general relativity, in Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam (2000), [http://books.google.com/books?id=zGFkK2tTXPsC&lpg=PA1&pg=PA235 p. 235.]
„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
As quoted by Paul Davies, Other Worlds (1980)
„We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago. We are in this sense, participators in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past and if we have one explanation for what's happening in the distant past why should we need more?“
— John Archibald Wheeler
[http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/the-anthropic-universe/3302686 "The Anthropic Universe"] (Feb 18, 2006) Australia's Science Show, with Martin Redfern moderating excerpts from several scientists, including Wheeler. [http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2006/02/ssw_20060218_1200.mp3 Audio recording] and transcript available. See also [https://web.archive.org/web/20080616183602/http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1572643.htm same show at WayBack Machine,] Internet archive.org.
„... we can afford many mistakes in the search. The main thing is to make as fast as possible.“
— John Archibald Wheeler
As quoted by Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne, and Wojciech H. Zurek. [https://authors.library.caltech.edu/15184/1/Misner2009p1638Phys_Today.pdf "John Wheeler, relativity, and quantum information."] Physics Today 62, no. 4 (April 2009): 40–46 (quote from p. 44)
„The question is—what is the question?“
— John Archibald Wheeler
Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War (2008), chapter 13 <!-- CD 5, track 20, 2:10 in the audiobook version -->
„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
"Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links" in Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information (1990) ed., Wojciech H. Zurek, [http://books.google.com/books?id=mdjsOeTgatsC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA5 p. 5.]
„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.“
— John Archibald Wheeler
"Albert Einstein" in Biographical Memoirs (1980) Vol. 51, National Academy of Sciences.
„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
[http://www.weylmann.com/wheeler.shtml "Hermann Weyl and the Unity of Knowledge"], American Scientist (July-August 1986) Vol. 74, pp. 366-375. Reprinted in At Home in the Universe (1993), [http://books.google.com/books?id=w9BXAAAAYAAJ&q=%22hermann+weyl+and+the+unity+of+knowledge%22#search_anchor p. 171.]
„Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening all at once.“
— John Archibald Wheeler
Wheeler quoted this saying in Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information (1990), [http://books.google.com/books?id=mdjsOeTgatsC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA10#v=onepage&q&f=false p. 10], with a footnote attributing it to "graffiti in the men's room of the Pecan Street Cafe, Austin, Texas". Later publications, such as Paul Davies' 1995 book About Time (p. 236), credited Wheeler with variations of this saying, but the quip is actually much older. The earliest known source is Ray Cummings' 1922 science fiction novel [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21094 The Girl in the Golden Atom,] Ch. V: " 'Time,' he said, 'is what keeps everything from happening at once.' "<!-- according to Science-Fiction: The Early Years by Everett F. Bleiler, [http://books.google.com/books?id=KEZxhkG5eikC&pg=PA171 p. 171], the novel was a composite of two earlier stories published in 1919 and 1920--> It also appears in his 1929 novel [http://books.google.com/books?id=YdZEAAAAYAAJ&q=%22everything+from+happening+at+once%22#search_anchor The Man Who Mastered Time.] The earliest known occurrence other than Cummings is from 1962 in Film Facts: Volume 5, [http://books.google.com/books?id=sr0vAQAAIAAJ&q=%22everything+from+happening+at+once%22 p. 48].
„Today 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…The physical world is in some deep sense tied to the human being.“
— John Archibald Wheeler
As quoted in by Ken Wilber in Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists (2001) Shambhala, .
