John Wheeler saw the tear in reality

It's interesting we have such receptivity in the HN community here on physicist-proposed metaphysics (yay!), yet in an entirely similar light - an article covering physicist Roger Penrose's 'microtubules' on HN a couple days ago, we get the reflexive "but experts say this is bunk' treatment.

Personally I don't know from Sam on either hypothesis. I'm just wondering for all things seeming equal, when do we get receptivity from the HN community and when to anticipate the knives coming out? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696559

> It is not a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.

It’s more palatable when we consider not the observation, but the information that was collapsed out of the superimposed states at the time of the observation. The universe uses lazy evaluation, and things only happen when they have effects on other things, and what we see as past depends on what we observe now, as both need to be consistent with each other.

Seriously, this article brings to mind the classic short story about a simulated universe: https://qntm.org/responsibility

And also the wildly speculative conjecture that our universe will be retroactively created by a super intelligent AI in the precise manner necessary to facilitate its own existence, from which it follows that we exist for the express purpose of creating it. (If anybody knows the source I might have stolen this one from please let me know.)

The source of his confusion is believing that all observers must share a single reality. This is not the case: as an observer of event A=a, you only share the same reality as all other observers who also measure A=a (or anything downstream of A=a). If some observer comes along and measures A=b, they split away from your reality. Only the version of that observer that saw A=a stays with you.

There is no "remote synchronization" mechanism between observers. All observations are independent, and when an observation is made, the other outcomes are not discarded, they continue "running in parallel" until another observer comes along. That is to say, from the perspective of other observers, you and your measures are also an observation they have to make (and thereby collapse).

“Hope produces space and time?”

The longer I live the more I appreciate Kurt Gödel’s proof that we can never know everything about the universe.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-godels-proof-works-202007...

Having every ‘observer’ also ‘participate’ seems to just make it even more intractably complex? Since presumably ‘participators’ can influence each other simultaneously.

So I just don’t see how any of these theories are attractive prospects, the infinite regress seems even more severe than superdeterminism theories.

It’s quite a shame this man got stuck on something that may be literally impossible to prove.

Who said that consciousness is "private property"? What if it's actually shared between people, like a field of some sort or another dimension, but everyone somehow gets their very own part of it? We know nothing about the nature of consciousness, so let's not assume anything about it. It might arise from the physical processes in the brain and be bounded by our known physics, sure, but it might just as well be something else entirely.

The really tough problems require minds that are wired differently and John Wheeler's mind was definitely a thing apart. Its the sort of unique mental fingerprint or aesthetic that characterizes great talents in this space (Feynman and Penrose are other examples of this trait, imho).

Compare Gravitation (the bible) and its boldness, inventiveness and playfulness with the sterile presentation of most theoretical physics textbooks before and after.

Anyway, he failed to bring on a new paradigm for "deep" physics. The intersection of geometry and quantum mechanics seems to be as elusive and mysterious as ever. But hope produced all our mental breakthroughs and, who knows, it may do so again.

On the blackboard he and his students wrote "Godel's Proof -- too important to be left to the mathematicians."

As a mathematician, I'd love if anyone here knew the context

/? "Wheeler's bags of gold" https://www.google.com/search?q=wheelers+bags+of+gold

Holographic principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle :

> The existence of such solutions conflicts with the holographic interpretation, and their effects in a quantum theory of gravity including the holographic principle are not yet fully understood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler

>Why don’t they create 10,000 separate space-times?

How do we know it doesn’t? The whole wavefunction collapse and single world is an untestable and unprovable assumption.

Going from pregeometry to spacetime as information with observer participation might in ways relate to the law of increasing functional complexity. What if observers start as other particles but join together to iterate in increasingly large combinations in order to generate increasing complexity in spacetime phenomena? Exotic particles in space might be kind of like interesting minerals forming in comets and so on.

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

4. This cause is uncaused, timeless, spaceless, and immaterial.

5. To create the universe, this cause must possess intentionality and decision-making capabilities.

6. Therefore, the cause of the universe is a personal, immaterial being: God.

How can there be a tear in reality, surely, what's behind the tear is more...reality?

> By choosing what to measure in the present, we participate in the creation of the past.

Not everybody accept this interpretation of this experiment!!

Wonder if the movie Interstellar was inspired by Wheeler.

God gives hope

Quanta is such a great resource! High value spend from Jim Simons vast pool of dollars.

I came across MTW’s “Gravitation” as a student in the 70’s and it inspired a positively unreasonable desire to own a copy just because it looked so beautiful. Couldn’t afford the doorstop of a book at that time but happily it is still in print 50 years later.