John Wheeler - Bit from Binary Digit. What has information to do with reality? (111/130)

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American physicist, John Wheeler (1911-2008), made seminal contributions to the theories of quantum gravity and nuclear fission, but is best known for coining the term 'black holes'. A keen teacher and mentor, he was also a key figure in the Manhattan Project. [Listener: Ken Ford]

TRANSCRIPT: Our colleague here in Princeton, John Tukey, is the one who, while working at Bell Laboratories, coined the word "bit", as an abbreviation for Binary Digit. And today, every computer user knows what the bit capacity of his machine is. The telephone lines, so many bits per second. But what has information to do with reality? Well, what do we mean by reality except as judged by our colleagues and ourselves. Observation, or in the sense of Bohr, irreversible acts of registration; and most of us know how hard it is to erase a registration on our memories, something that's happened. But is there any other reality in the world except what we get by these acts of registration? If not, then how could one expect to build a theory of the world on anything but acts of observation? That's where I think one has a doorway to the future.