Legendary Physicist John Archibald Wheeler on Death and the Life-Force – The Marginalian

“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,” Walt Whitman writes in the prime of life.

“What happens when you get to the end of things?” four-year-old Johnny in Ohio asks his mother from the bathtub while Whitman’s borrowed atoms are becoming young grass in a New Jersey cemetery.

In his lifetime of nearly a century, John Archibald Wheeler (July 9, 1911–April 13, 2008) would go on revolutionize physics by posing this question to reality itself, emerging as a bridge figure between the world of relativity and the quantum world. The student of one Nobel laureate (Niels Bohr) and the teacher of another (Kip Thorne), he walked with Albert Einstein, shaped Stephen Hawking’s ideas about the singularity, and coined the term black hole. Four centuries after Leibniz launched the information age by developing binary arithmetic — the underlying logic of 1s and 0s, of yeses and nos, that constitutes all information — Wheeler posited that, at the fundamental level, reality is made of two things only: binary choices and a chooser. “All things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe,” he wrote in his brilliant and brilliantly titled It from Bit theory. “Observer-participancy gives rise to information.” That he never received a Nobel Prize is a testament to Wheeler’s animating spirit — he was interested not in the answers for which it is awarded but in the questions that quicken the mind with participancy in the universe. Questions like what happens at the end — of space and time, of mass and energy, of life.

The year he turned seventy, Wheeler became one of the artists and scientists whom Viennese psychologist Lisl M. Goodman, then in her early thirties, interviewed for her fascinating out-of-print book Death and the Creative Life (public library) — vibrant and overt affirmation of the elemental fact that all creative work, be it a theorem or a poem, is our best instrument for wresting meaning from our transient lives, the best way we have of bearing our mortality.

Wheeler addresses this directly when asked why he does what he does:

To understand why we are here. The universe without any consciousness would not be the universe. We haven’t found the meaning, but there must be one. These questions, about life and about death, are the most important to me.

In consonance with Whitman’s proclamation that “what invigorates life invigorates death,” Wheeler adds:

Life without death is meaningless. It’s like a picture without a frame. Death gives value to life. More than that, without death there is no life.

Half a century after Rilke insisted that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” Wheeler considers the irrepressible vitality of the living here-and-now, the throbbing atom of eternity that is each passing moment, which would go pulseless if it were to become permanent:

Life is more important than the ones who do the living… All the preciousness and meaning of life would be drained away if one could go on living forever.

Citing his love of Emily Dickinson — who wrote beautifully about “the drift called the infinite,” and who died at the peak of her powers — he auguries:

By understanding death better we will understand life better.

Perhaps death so fascinated Wheeler because it is the starkest subset of his greatest scientific obsession: time. Death is life having run out of time, the event horizon past which all happening ceases for the living observer. But in Wheeler’s physics, nothing happens at all — everything has already happened and is always happening, and past and present are not a function of time but of the observer’s vantage. “No phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon,” Wheeler wrote three years earlier with an eye to the famous double-slit experiments demonstrating how profoundly the quantum world violates our basic intuitions about reality:

It is not a paradox that we choose what shall have happened after it has already happened [because] it has not really happened, it is not a phenomenon, until it is an observed phenomenon.

At the peak of his ninety-seventh spring, death observed Wheeler and everything continued to happen, not happening at all.

Couple with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on what happens when we die, then revisit the mathematical prodigy William James Sidis, writing when Wheeler was still a boy, on how the quantum undoing of time and thermodynamics changes life and death.