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John Archibald Wheeler Quotes
1911–2008 United States
John Archibald Wheeler (July 9, 1911 – April 13, 2008) was an eminent American theoretical physicist. One of the later collaborators of Albert Einstein, he tried to achieve Einstein's vision of a unified field theory.
United States Academics Physicists Also known as: John Wheeler
Random John Archibald Wheeler quote
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Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.
We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Time is not a primary category, and the asymmetry of time between past and future is not a primary category in the description of nature. It is secondary and derived.
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 will first understand how simple the universe is when we realize how strange it is.
Therefore we can afford many mistakes in the search. The main thing is to make them as fast as possible.
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.
The question is—what is the question?
What we think of as smooth simple space is really a wiggly business.
Space tells matter how to move
Gravitation (1973)
The best way to learn something is to have to teach it.
Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that when — in a decade, a century, or a millennium — we grasp it, we will all say to each other, "Oh, how could it have been otherwise!"
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?
Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening all at once.
Misattributed
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