49 Quotes by John Archibald Wheeler

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 .

We will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.

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.

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.

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.

The job of a theoretical physicist is to make mistakes as fast as possible .

'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?

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

We all know that the real reason universities have students is in order to educate the professors.