John Archibald Wheeler

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 — 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 registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.

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

The best way to learn something is to have to teach it.

... we can afford many mistakes in the search. The main thing is to make as fast as possible.

The question is—what is the question?

What we think of as smooth simple space is really a wiggly business.

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.

Space tells matter how to move
Matter tells space how to curve

If I had to confess, under torture, right now, what I think the simple idea is, I would say it's that we ourselves generate the world; the world is self-generated. But it may well be absolutely wrong.

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?

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.

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

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.

We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.