ris3n's Apologetics Codex

Person

John Wheeler

American theoretical physicist (9 July 1911 to 13 April 2008). One of the most important physicists of the 20th century. He taught at Princeton for nearly 40 years (1938 to 1976) and then at the University of Texas at Austin (1976 to 1986). He gave us many of the everyday words of modern physics, "black hole", "wormhole", "quantum foam", "it from bit", and "participatory universe". He also trained more leading theoretical physicists than any other American of his century. His students included Richard Feynman, Hugh Everett III, Kip Thorne, Jacob Bekenstein, and William Unruh.

In the second half of his career Wheeler shifted from gravity and nuclear physics to the foundations of quantum mechanics and information theory. In his 1989 Santa Fe essay "Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links" he argued that all of physical reality is, at bottom, made of information. He called this thesis "it from bit" (see It from Bit for the full development). Christian apologists have picked up the idea, most prominently Stephen Meyer in Return of the God Hypothesis (2021) and others in the Discovery Institute orbit, even though Wheeler himself was not a Christian.

Background

There are ads on our codex that pay for hosting and keep the codex free. If you can, please consider whitelisting ris3n.com or allowing scripts to support the work.

Sponsored

  • 9 July 1911, born in Jacksonville, Florida, to Joseph Lewis Wheeler (a librarian) and Mabel Archibald Wheeler.
  • 1933, finished his Ph.D. in physics at Johns Hopkins University at age 21. His dissertation, under Karl Herzfeld, was on how helium absorbs and scatters light.
  • 1933 to 1934, postdoctoral year at New York University with Gregory Breit. Together they worked out the Breit-Wheeler process, the prediction that two photons of light, if energetic enough, can collide and turn into an electron and a positron (an electron's antimatter twin).
  • 1934 to 1935, postdoctoral year with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen.
  • 1935 to 1938, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina.
  • 1938, hired by Princeton; stayed there for 38 years, eventually as the Joseph Henry Professor of Physics.
  • September 1939, with Niels Bohr, published the paper "The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission" in Physical Review. The paper used a "liquid drop" model of the atomic nucleus to explain why uranium-235 splits when struck by a neutron (while uranium-238 does not). It appeared on 1 September 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland, and it underlay the math the Manhattan Project later relied on.
  • 1942 to 1945, Manhattan Project. Wheeler worked at the Hanford Site in Washington State on the reactors that produced plutonium for the Trinity test (16 July 1945) and the Nagasaki bomb (9 August 1945). Wheeler's brother Joe was killed in the Italian campaign in 1944. Wheeler later said he weighed the bomb's role in shortening the war against the cost of his brother's death.
  • 1945, with his graduate student Richard Feynman, published the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory. It re-described electromagnetism as direct "action at a distance" between charged particles, using both forward-in-time and backward-in-time effects. The math matches standard electromagnetism in most cases, and the ideas shaped Feynman's later quantum electrodynamics (for which Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize).
  • 1950s, with Bryce DeWitt, produced the Wheeler-DeWitt equation of quantum cosmology. The equation tries to describe the whole universe as a quantum object. One striking feature: time drops out, leaving a timeless wave function of the universe. It is foundational to quantum cosmology and underlies the Hartle-Hawking "no boundary" proposal (see Kalam Cosmological Argument P3 objection 4 and the Stephen Meyer Cosmology Models source).
  • 1955, coined "geon" (short for gravitational-electromagnetic entity), an imagined ball of light held together by its own gravity. This was part of his broader program called geometrodynamics, the attempt to build everything in physics, including matter and electric charge, out of pure spacetime geometry. The program is summarized in the 1973 textbook Gravitation (Misner-Thorne-Wheeler), still in print at ~1,300 pages.
  • 1957, coined "wormhole" for an imagined shortcut tunnel connecting two distant regions of spacetime. In Wheeler's geometrodynamics, electric charge itself might come from such tunnels ("charge without charge").
  • 1957, supervised the Princeton Ph.D. of Hugh Everett III, whose dissertation became the founding paper of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Wheeler personally carried it to Bohr in Copenhagen hoping for an endorsement; Bohr rejected it, and the interpretation sat dormant until DeWitt revived it in 1970.
  • 1967, made the term "black hole" stick after using it in a NASA lecture (others had used it earlier, but Wheeler's use was the one that took). Wheeler had previously called these objects "completely collapsed gravitational objects." His late-1960s work with his student Jacob Bekenstein founded the field of black hole physics. Bekenstein's 1972 thesis proposed that a black hole has entropy (a measure of hidden information) proportional to the area of its surface: S = A / 4.
  • 1968, awarded the Enrico Fermi Award by the Atomic Energy Commission.
  • 1976, retired from Princeton; joined the University of Texas at Austin as the Ashbel Smith Professor of Physics until 1986. The Texas years were his most productive period on the foundations of quantum mechanics.
  • 1978, proposed the delayed-choice experiment. The setup: send a photon through an apparatus, then decide after the photon enters the apparatus whether to measure it as a wave or as a particle. Quantum mechanics predicts the photon behaves as whichever you decided to measure. The experiment was actually performed (Jacques et al., 2007) and the prediction held up. Wheeler took this as support for his slogan, "no phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon."
  • 1983, published "Law without Law" in the volume Quantum Theory and Measurement. Here he laid out the participatory universe thesis: physical law itself emerges from the act of observation. The universe is self-excited, a closed loop in which observers bring forth the universe that brings forth observers.
  • 1989, presented at the Santa Fe Institute the essay "Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links", the canonical statement of "It from bit" (see It from Bit for the full development).
  • 1997, awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics for his work on general relativity and black holes.
  • 2000, published the memoir Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics (Norton, with Kenneth Ford), the main autobiographical source for his life.
  • 13 April 2008, died in Hightstown, New Jersey, age 96. Survived by his wife Janette and three children.

Coined terms

Wheeler invented or made standard an unusual number of the household words of late-20th-century physics. The list below all entered standard usage:

  • Black hole (1967, the use that made it stick; the term existed earlier)
  • Wormhole (1957)
  • Quantum foam (1955 or 1957, depending on source). The idea: at extremely tiny scales, spacetime itself bubbles and fluctuates instead of being smooth.
  • Geon (1955)
  • Geometrodynamics (1957)
  • Mass without mass and charge without charge (his slogans for the geometrodynamic program)
  • Participatory universe (1983, Law without Law)
  • It from bit (1989, Information, Physics, Quantum)
  • Self-excited circuit (his image for the participatory universe; cited in Second Way - Efficient Causality)
  • Genesis bit (the informational starting-point of physical reality)
  • Delayed-choice experiment (1978)
  • No phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon (his most-quoted line)

Doctoral students and mentees (selected)

Wheeler advised more doctoral theses in theoretical physics than any other major American physicist of his century. A short list:

  • Richard Feynman (Ph.D. 1942), Nobel Prize in Physics 1965 (with Tomonaga and Schwinger) for quantum electrodynamics. The Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory was their joint work.
  • Hugh Everett III (Ph.D. 1957), originator of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
  • Kip Thorne (Ph.D. 1965), Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 (with Weiss and Barish) for the LIGO detection of gravitational waves. Co-author of Gravitation.
  • Jacob Bekenstein (Ph.D. 1972), founder of black hole thermodynamics; Wolf Prize in Physics 2012.
  • William Unruh (Ph.D. 1971), the Unruh effect (the prediction that an accelerating observer sees empty space as a warm bath of particles); Dirac Medal 2024.
  • Robert M. Wald (Ph.D. 1972), author of General Relativity (1984), a standard graduate text.
  • Charles Misner (Ph.D. 1957), co-author of Gravitation.

The breadth of his student lineage is sometimes called "the Wheeler school" and accounts for a sizable share of late-20th-century work on general relativity, quantum gravity, and quantum foundations.

Theological / metaphysical position

Wheeler was not a Christian and did not affirm a personal God in the way orthodox theism does. Across the decades his public statements ranged from agnostic to naturalistic to metaphysically open. Late in life he wrote: "to my mind there must be, at the bottom of it all, not an equation, but an utterly simple idea. And to me that idea, when we finally discover it, will be so compelling, so inevitable, that we will say to one another, 'Oh, how beautiful. How could it have been otherwise.'"

He treated the foundational questions of quantum mechanics and cosmology as theologically suggestive without committing to any specific theology. His mentor Niels Bohr held a similar stance; Wheeler inherited and extended it.

Apologetic deployment in the codex

Wheeler's work shows up at multiple points in the codex's apologetic case:

  • Information-theoretic argument for theism (It from Bit, the concept page): if reality is fundamentally informational rather than material, then mind or Logos is more basic than matter. That points toward a Mind grounding reality. Stephen Meyer (Return of the God Hypothesis, 2021) deploys Wheeler's "it from bit" in exactly this way. The Christian doctrine of the Logos (John 1.1, "in the beginning was the Word") and the Genesis 1 pattern of "God said... and it was so" both run information from Mind to reality, the same shape Wheeler's thesis names.
  • Participatory universe and the observer-demand (Argument from the Observer-Demand Convergence): Wheeler's participatory universe and delayed-choice experiment are core data for the convergence argument that physics' observer-dependence and phenomenology's demand-to-be-witnessed point in the same direction, toward God as Observer.
  • Wheeler-DeWitt equation and the Kalam objection (Kalam Cosmological Argument P3 objection 4): the "timeless quantum substrate" response to the Kalam premise "the universe began to exist" leans on Wheeler-DeWitt. The defeater treats it.
  • Self-excited circuit and the Second Way objection (Second Way - Efficient Causality P3 objection 1): the "bootstrap models" response to the impossibility of self-causation leans on Wheeler's self-excited circuit. The defeater treats it as an equivocation on "self."

See also

Concepts

Other scientists in the codex

  • Fred Hoyle, the "why I am not a Christian" astronomer; Wheeler-era cosmologist
  • Frank Tipler, the Omega Point physicist (the codex's only explicitly theistic working cosmologist)
  • Hugh Ross, astronomer and progressive-creationist apologist
  • Gerald Schroeder, physicist and Jewish theistic-cosmology author
  • Stephen Meyer, philosopher of science whose Return of the God Hypothesis (2021) deploys Wheeler's "it from bit"

Sources