Top 34 Archibald Wheeler Quotes

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

John Archibald Wheeler

#2. 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

John Archibald Wheeler

#3. Knowledge only progresses by making mistakes as fast as possible.

John Archibald Wheeler

#4. In order to more fully understand this reality, we must take into account other dimensions of a broader reality.

John Archibald Wheeler

#5. 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.

John Archibald Wheeler

#6. 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.

John Archibald Wheeler

#7. 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

#8. One can only learn by teaching.

John Archibald Wheeler

#9. Physicists love this number not just because it is dimensionless, but also because it is a combination of three fundamental constants of nature. Why do these constants come together to make the particular number 1/137.036 and not some other number?

John Archibald Wheeler

#10. 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?

John Archibald Wheeler

#11. 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.

John Archibald Wheeler

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

John Archibald Wheeler

#13. Now is the time for everyone who believes in the rule of reason to speak up against pathological science and its purveyors.

John Archibald Wheeler

#14. Surely where there's smoke there's fire? No, where there's so much smoke there's smoke.

John Archibald Wheeler

#15. Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.

John Archibald Wheeler

#16. Yes, there is happiness to be found in the mere contemplation of the deepest mysteries.

John Archibald Wheeler

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

John Archibald Wheeler

#18. What we call the past is built on bits. - John Archibald Wheeler

James Gleick

#19. 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.

John Archibald Wheeler

#20. In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.

John Archibald Wheeler

#21. 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.

John Archibald Wheeler

#22. No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.

John Archibald Wheeler

#23. The laws of physics that we regard
as 'sacred,' as immutable, are anything
but.

John Archibald Wheeler

#24. 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.

John Archibald Wheeler

#25. Individual events. Events beyond law. Events so numerous and so uncoordinated that, flaunting their freedom from formula, they yet fabricate firm form.

John Archibald Wheeler

#26. Nobody can be anybody without somebodies around.

John Archibald Wheeler

#27. The observer cannot be left out of the description of the observation.

John Archibald Wheeler

#28. 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 .

John Archibald Wheeler

#29. We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense this is aparticipatory universe.

John Archibald Wheeler

#30. It was the defining event and remains a thousand degrees hot.

John Archibald Wheeler

#31. This is *our* Universe, our museum of wonder and beauty, our cathedral.

John Archibald Wheeler

#32. Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once.

John Archibald Wheeler

#33. The universe gives birth to consciousness, and consciousness gives meaning to the universe.

John Archibald Wheeler

#34. Spacetime grips mass, telling it how to move ...
Mass grips spacetime, telling it how to curve

John Archibald Wheeler

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