John Archibald Wheeler was one of the last of the great scientist-philosophers. He wore his science on his sleeve and wasn't ever afraid to go out on a limb with novel ideas or to admit he was wrong. He even would often engage in private brainstorming...
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John Archibald Wheeler was one of the last of the great scientist-philosophers. He wore his science on his sleeve and wasn't ever afraid to go out on a limb with novel ideas or to admit he was wrong. He even would often engage in private brainstorming sessions in front of large audiences. A major problem struggled with is how the universe could be both self-contained and logically consistent, in light of Gödel's incompleteness theorem. He came to the conclusion we live in a participatory universe, perceptions of physical phenomena are generated by the observer instead of having been laid out as a preexisting external existence. He coined the term "It from Bit" to describe this new vision in his typical terse and pithy manner. The following essay highlights the salient features of Wheeler's interpretation and points out facts about the oft-misused term "information." The author concludes the essay by extrapolating Wheeler’s "It from Bit" into a new cosmological model.
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