John Wheeler - Wheeler's drawing of the big U: concept of observer participancy (109/130)

To listen to more of John Wheeler’s stories, go to the playlist:    • John Wheeler (Scientist)  

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: It's a picture to inspire thought, it doesn't record an experiment or a formula. There's the letter 'U'. The U starts with a thin stem, the beginning of the universe. At the beginning, the universe is small. This stemmed U gets fatter as we go up to this side of the letter. And at a certain point it's terminated by a big circle, and there, there's an eye sitting and that eye is looking back to the first days of the universe. We ourselves can get radiation today, and do get radiation today, from the very early days of the universe. But in so far as the act of observation has anything to do with what we do when we ascribe reality to what we see, then we can say, this observer who was brought into existence by the universe, has, by his acts of observation, a part in bringing that universe itself into being.