
To John Wheeler, the race to explain time was personal - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/66/clockwork/haunted-by-his-brother-he-revolutionized-physics-rp
======
yodon
I was lucky enough to have met John Wheeler when I was in grad school. He was
a wonderful man who radiated joy and curiosity.

My favorite anecdote about him, which was not widely known, involved what used
to be called "nut letters." Before the internet, if you were a famous
scientist, particularly a famous physicist, you would receive actual letters
from people all over the world asking for help with their perpetual motion
machines, time travel devices, and similar nutty theories. Having worked on
black holes, gravity, general relativity, and the bomb, Wheeler was quite a
nut magnet. He was also blessed with a bit of OCD in the way he organized and
categorized all his notes (his annotated bibliography for Misner Thorne and
Wheeler Gravitation filled many shelves in the library). John didn't just
receive nut letters. He received, read, organized, filed, classified, and
acted on nut letters. His preferred response to them was "I'm afraid I'm not
very knowledgeable in the area of your work but I believe you should contact
_____ who is working on similar conjectures and may be a good source of
additional insights" at which point both parties in that conversation would be
so ecstatic to be talking with someone recommended to them by the great John
Wheeler that they'd never bother him again. While in grad school, I happened
to read an article in the New York Times on a perpetual motion machine (their
weekly Science Times section was fantastic but did occasionally step into
pseudo science topics). At the end of the article the main researcher thanked
John Wheeler for having introduced him to the theorist who had helped him
refine his understanding of the mechanisms at play in his invention, and I
couldn't help but smile at the wonderful successes of John Wheeler's nut
dating service.

~~~
sidlls
My colleagues and I used to get these "nut letters" occasionally even as
unknown grad students. They were quite a treat to read: the human imagination
is a marvel, and curiosity knows no bounds. If they'd taken slightly different
paths than they had, some probably would have even been with my colleagues
reading those letters instead of writing them.

~~~
meowface
I wonder if any of these nut letters have ever yielded useful scientific
discoveries or advances. I figure one or two must have, even if only by
accident, or indirectly.

~~~
Isamu
Maybe not the "nut" letters, which are frequently very nutty, but random
letters can.

In this episode of Tested Joe DeRisi describes how a random letter from a
snake owner led to some interesting published results in molecular biology.

[https://www.tested.com/old-
categories/podcasts/854328-scarie...](https://www.tested.com/old-
categories/podcasts/854328-scariest-episode-yet-still-untitled-adam-savage-
project-103018/)

~~~
kbenson
Wow, that's one of the best guests I've heard on that podcast (and in
general!). I'm a few months behind, so I hadn't heard this one yet, so thanks.

The title isn't wrong, either, this one is terrifying (so far).

------
gloriousduke
I need to get caught up on new developments regarding Wheeler's "Participatory
Universe" to find out if anyone else is thinking along these lines, but if
observation does result in existence becoming--wave function(s) collapsing
into the truly concrete--then essentially the history of the Universe occurred
instantly when the first observation of it was made? I don't know where that
conscious observer would have been located. Earth? A planet like it? Perhaps
on every world (simultaneously of course) where the retrocausal positioning of
conscious entities made sense?

~~~
vorg
> the history of the Universe occurred instantly when the first observation of
> it was made

Perhaps that history could still collapse into existence in stages, as
subsequent observations of it became more detailed. The first observer would
see far-off galaxies as small white dots in the sky, but not the composition
and interaction of each, so perhaps those aspects don't decohere until later
observers see more using telescopes.

And not only history but also laws of physics could come into existence in
this way. If earthlings are the only observers in the Universe, perhaps dark
matter holding galaxies in a circular shape is a law of physics which only
came into existence when observers on Earth could start seeing inside other
galaxies.

------
omazurov
_> The faster you go, the slower time goes. If you could go as fast as light,
you’d see time come to a halt and disappear._

No, you wouldn't. Someone observing you would. Am I getting relativity wrong?

~~~
zinclozenge
You are getting relativity wrong. The layman phrase being used here 'time come
to a halt and disappear' encodes what would happen from a relativity
perspective. Everything that you would be seeing relative to you, would appear
as if time had stopped if you were traveling at c.

~~~
ars
If you were traveling at C you would not really see anything [external] at
all. Length contraction would be such that everything around you would appear
as a single motionless point.

Any incoming light would be blue shifted to infinity, or red shifted to zero,
so if any actually touched you there would be infinite energy there. Luckily
no light can actually reach you - nothing can. You would have no incoming
sensory information at all.

Because of length contraction there's no distance between the start and and of
your journey, so from your POV it doesn't take an time at all, since the
distance was so short.

~~~
kgwgk
If you were traveling at c you would be a photon :-)

------
kieckerjan
What irks me in articles like this is the term observer. Define observer.
Sure, a human is an observer. But can a dog be an observer? A plasmodium? A
virus bumping into a molecule and changing its course? Is observing shorthand
for any interaction that can collapse a wave function? In that case it seems
highly unlikely to me that a photon can travel billions of light years
unperturbed.

~~~
contravariant
I prefer the quantum decoherence perspective where being 'observed' basically
means interacting with a macroscopic object in a way that's similar to the
notion of reaching 'thermodynamic equilibrium' in statistical physics.

~~~
aidenn0
"macroscopic object" is unsatisfying though because macroscopic objects are
made out of objects that are describable under QM.

~~~
contravariant
Maybe so, but that's a problem shared by both thermodynamics and quantum
mechanics. Both have macroscopic objects that exhibit phenomena like
temperature, friction, wave function collapse, that simply don't exist on the
smaller scale.

The good news is that macroscopic objects exhibit behaviours that are
predictable. The bad news is that. while those behaviours are related to the
behaviour of the microscopic scale, a full description of systems involving
that many particles will likely remain out of our reach forever. Although I
could see it happening that we might be able to simulate systems of a
sufficient scale to convincingly demonstrate wave function collapse.

------
empath75
On observers creating the universe, I’ve sometimes wondered if given the
simulation hypothesis, that simulating quantum mechanics is so computationally
expensive that it isn’t done unless we’re looking at it, and that the high
energy levels required to probe smaller and smaller length scales is an
artifact of the computational requirements of simulating it.

~~~
bloak
That's an interesting thought. It it's true, it seems to have some
implications:

* Whoever is running the simulation cares about whether we're looking.

* They had a good reason for going with quantum mechanics rather than something that would be easier to simulate.

I know some people would say that's because they're interested in simulating
conscious life and quantum mechanics is essential for consciousness. However,
I find it very implausible that quantum mechanics is essential for
consciousness so I'd prefer a different hypothesis for why they went with a
difficult-to-simulate physics in their simulated universe. Any ideas?

~~~
ben_w
Idea: their reality is much more computationally complex than quantum
mechanics, so much so the difference between classical and quantum is
irrelevant from a cost point of view and matters only from a results point of
view.

~~~
jerf
Another possibility is simply that they've got wildly more resources than we
can imagine. It's ferociously expensive to run the universe on a classical
simulation of QM, but finite. We have no particular reason to believe this
"higher reality" doesn't have this level of resources. I've often pondered our
universe as the moral equivalent of an elementary school demonstration; what
if we're some metaphorical elementary kid's homework, because our physics is
relatively simple (assuming some ToE that may actually be simpler than meets
the current eye) and produces interesting results?

We can reasonably discuss the feasibility of simulating our universe using our
universe. We can do some reasonable discussion of "universes that run
something like ours but with some differences". We are profoundly ignorant
about everything else.

~~~
nixpulvis
I can't help but find it unsettling listening to a subject of the universe
describe it as "relatively simple". Simple relative to what?! Some arbitrary
more complex system? Well Sure!

Frankly, I don't think it's a question of complexity, or even expressivity,
but more one of encapsulation and information hiding.

~~~
whatshisface
The fundamental laws of the universe, at present, seem to be a whole lot
simpler than many of the things that arise from them. That's as much of a
statement in that direction as I think can be supported.

------
ASipos
First read this as "the race to explain that time was personal".

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> "the race to explain that time was personal"

That's special relativity in a nutshell.

------
Koshkin
> _He Revolutionized Physics_

Did he, really?

