“To die is totally different from what anyone supposed, and luckier,” Walt Whitman writes within the prime of life.
“What occurs if you get to the top of issues?” four-year-old Johnny in Ohio asks his mom from the bath whereas Whitman’s borrowed atoms have gotten younger grass in a New Jersey cemetery.
In his lifetime of practically a century, John Archibald Wheeler (July 9, 1911–April 13, 2008) would go on revolutionize physics by posing this query to actuality itself, rising as a bridge determine between the world of relativity and the quantum world. The coed of 1 Nobel laureate (Niels Bohr) and the instructor of one other (Kip Thorne), he walked with Albert Einstein, formed Stephen Hawking’s concepts about the singularity, and coined the time period black gap. 4 centuries after Leibniz launched the knowledge age by growing binary arithmetic — the underlying logic of 1s and 0s, of yeses and nos, that constitutes all data — Wheeler posited that, on the basic degree, actuality is manufactured from two issues solely: binary decisions and a chooser. “All issues bodily are information-theoretic in origin and this can be a participatory universe,” he wrote in his sensible and brilliantly titled It from Bit concept. “Observer-participancy offers rise to data.” That he by no means acquired a Nobel Prize is a testomony to Wheeler’s animating spirit — he was not within the solutions for which it’s awarded however within the questions that quicken the thoughts with participancy within the universe. Questions like what occurs on the finish — of house and time, of mass and vitality, of life.
The yr he turned seventy, Wheeler turned one of many artists and scientists whom Viennese psychologist Lisl M. Goodman, then in her early thirties, interviewed for her fascinating out-of-print guide Loss of life and the Inventive Life (public library) — vibrant and overt affirmation of the fundamental reality that every one artistic work, be it a theorem or a poem, is our greatest instrument for wresting which means from our transient lives, the easiest way now we have of bearing our mortality.
Wheeler addresses this immediately when requested why he does what he does:
To grasp why we’re right here. The universe with none consciousness wouldn’t be the universe. We haven’t discovered the which means, however there should be one. These questions, about life and about dying, are a very powerful to me.
In consonance with Whitman’s proclamation that “what invigorates life invigorates dying,” Wheeler provides:
Life with out dying is meaningless. It’s like an image with out a body. Loss of life offers worth to life. Greater than that, with out dying there isn’t a life.
Half a century after Rilke insisted that “dying is our buddy exactly as a result of it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that’s right here, that’s pure, that’s love,” Wheeler considers the irrepressible vitality of the residing here-and-now, the throbbing atom of eternity that’s every passing second, which might go pulseless if it had been to develop into everlasting:
Life is extra vital than those who do the residing… All of the preciousness and which means of life could be drained away if one might go on residing perpetually.
Citing his love of Emily Dickinson — who wrote fantastically about “the drift known as the infinite,” and who died on the peak of her powers — he auguries:
By understanding dying higher we’ll perceive life higher.
Maybe dying so fascinated Wheeler as a result of it’s the starkest subset of his biggest scientific obsession: time. Loss of life is life having run out of time, the occasion horizon previous which all occurring ceases for the residing observer. However in Wheeler’s physics, nothing occurs in any respect — the whole lot has already occurred and is all the time occurring, and previous and current aren’t a perform of time however of the observer’s vantage. “No phenomenon is a phenomenon till it’s an noticed phenomenon,” Wheeler wrote three years earlier with an eye fixed to the well-known double-slit experiments demonstrating how profoundly the quantum world violates our fundamental intuitions about actuality:
It’s not a paradox that we select what shall have occurred after it has already occurred [because] it has probably not occurred, it’s not a phenomenon, till it’s an noticed phenomenon.
On the peak of his ninety-seventh spring, dying noticed Wheeler and the whole lot continued to occur, not occurring in any respect.
Couple with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on what occurs after we die, then revisit the mathematical prodigy William James Sidis, writing when Wheeler was nonetheless a boy, on how the quantum undoing of time and thermodynamics modifications life and dying.