John Wheeler Saw the Tear in Reality
An editorially independent publication supported by the Simons Foundation.
W hen Johnny Wheeler was 4 years old, splashing in the bathtub in Youngstown, Ohio, he looked up at his mother and asked, “What happens when you get to the end of things?” The question would haunt him for the rest of his life. What happens when you get to the bottom of space? What happens when you get to the edge of time? It would lead him to suggest that space-time can’t be the true fabric of the universe. It would compel him, even in his final days, to search for some deeper reality beneath space-time and to wonder whether, somehow, that reality loops back to us.
John Archibald Wheeler was a physicist’s physicist. He never won a Nobel Prize, never became a household name, but to those in the know, he was a legend. He broke ground in many areas of physics: particle, nuclear, gravitational, quantum. He studied under Niels Bohr, walked and talked with Albert Einstein. He was ambitious, to put it mildly, but it was never for personal gain. Wheeler wanted to solve the mysteries of the universe so that he could give answers back to his community. He had a motto: “Nobody can be anybody without somebodies around.” He spread his insights widely, letting his students shine. Richard Feynman, Hugh Everett, Jacob Bekenstein, Kip Thorne — they, among others, became luminaries in his glow. When a Princeton University donor offered to dedicate a physics building in his honor, Wheeler declined, saying the building shouldn’t be “focused on one person. Physics isn’t done that way.”
Throughout his career, which spanned much of the 20th century, Wheeler kept detailed journals — large, hardbound notebooks bursting with every insight, hunch, dead end and breakthrough. Those journals, now held at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, reveal something remarkable: It was exactly Wheeler’s desire to put community first that shaped his struggle to understand the origin of space-time.
