PART VIII.

OTHER THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

How Come the Quantum?”

J O H N ARCHIBALD WHEELER
Centerfor Theoretical Physics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin. Texas 7871 2

WHENCE THE NECESSITY OF THE QUANTUM?

The quantum, foundation principle of twentieth century physics, and indispensible

working tool for anyone who would make reliable predictions in the world of the small,
still comes to many as strange, unwelcome, forced on man from outside against his will.
The necessity of the quantum in the construction of existence: out of what deeper
requirement does it arise? 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, how could it have been otherwise? How could we have been so
stupid for so long?
It was not by asking always small questions that physics has achieved its
astounding advances. It will surely not be by asking always small questions that the
community will some day find the answer to the great question, “HOW come the
quantum?” To ask the right question, however, one must have, as is well known, some
glimmer of the answer. It is also old experience that in order to break out of blank
puzzlement and into the right question-and-answer circuit, one must try and try again.
One must, if necessary, make a fool of oneself many times over, thus following the
example of the engine inventor, John Kris, with his familiar words about each new
model-“Start her up and see why she don’t work.”
What are the features and difficulties of a recent model, “existence as meaning
circuit”?’-3 First, let us look at the model, then a t the problems.

THE MEANING MODEL A PARTICIPATORY UNIVERSE

Physics gives rise, as depicted in FIGURE1, to light, pressure, and sound. They
provide means of communication, of the importance of which Niels Bohr notes,
“. . .every analysis of the conditions of human knowledge must rest on considerations of
the character and scope of our means of comm~nication.”~ Physics is also the
foundation of chemistry and biology, out of which arise communicators. Communica-
tors plus means of communication permit the development of meaning in the sense
elucidated by leading English and American schools of philosophy in recent decades, as
summarized, for example, by D. F#llesdal: “Meaning is the joint product of all the
evidence available to those who c o m m ~ n i c a t e . ” ~
From meaning back to physics, the circuit under examination makes its way by a
less apparent or underground sequence of linkages. Meaning rests on action. Action

‘This work was assisted by NSF Grant No. PHY-8503890 and by the Center for Theoretical
Physics.
304
WHEELER HOW COME THE QUANTUM? 305

forces the choosing between complementary questions and the distinguishing of

answers. Distinguishability, in the realm of complementary possibilities, demands for
its measurement complex probability amplitudes. The change in the phase of a
complex probability amplitude around a closed circuit not only measures the flux of
field through that circuit, but can even be regarded as the definition and very essence of
that field. Fields, in turn, can be viewed as the building stuff of particles; and fields plus
particles generate the world of physics with which the hypothesized meaning circuit
began.

COMPLEMENTARITY"

THE ANSWER

COMPLEX PROBABILITY

AROUND A LOOP

PARTICLES

FIGURE 1. Meaning circuit as a model of existence; a loop tied into closure by observer-
participancy.

The start of the underground portion of the meaning circuit demands now a closer
look.

THE QUESTION-AND-ANSWER FEATURE OF THE ELEMENTARY

QUANTUM PHENOMENON

Evidence available to the communicator comes from the asking of a question and
the distinguishing of an answer. Do we ask a question about this or that by taking a
306 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

look at it? Does one glance of the eye take in 10" bits of information? Are we then
asked to write a paragraph on what we have seen, or are we required otherwise to
display the evidence upon which we act? Do we find that out of a melange so great, the
brain has squeezed an amount of information-ven a t best-that is so small as lo3or
lo2 bits?6 Then, in everyday affairs, we are evidently very far away from the level of
the elementary quantum phenomenon. In spite of all the mystery about how the brain
accomplishes this action-oriented miracle, though, we know that every bit of informa-
tion, every item of sight or touch or sound, goes back in the last analysis for its
transmission to elementary quantum phenomena.

H
._
*DELAYED,'
CHOICE:

I
3s IN OR OUT. *

ROUTE ?

-.-. .
,
/
WHEELER HOW COME THE QUANTUM? 307

half-silvered mirror a t the point of crossing of the two beams and determine the relative
counting rate of the two photon detectors.
Shall we install the second half-silvered mirror or shall we leave it out? W e cannot
do both. Not until we make that decision have we chosen what question to ask. To ask
both phase and route at the same time and in the same experiment is impossible.
The choice can be delayed’ until the photon has passed through the first
half-silvered mirror, has undergone reflection at the next mirror, and has arrived
almost at the point of crossing of the two beams. This circumstance shows how wrong it
is to say that we are finding out in the one case “which route” and in the other case the
relation of phases in a “two-route mode of travel.” The world is built in such a way that
it denies us the possibility to speak in any well-defined way of “what the photon is
doing” in its travel from point of entry to point of reception.
No elementary quantum phenomenong is a phenomenon until it is a registered
phenomenon, brought to a close by an irreversible act of amplification. Definite as are
the point of entry and point of detection of the photon, what it is doing in between is
totally smoky.” Equally smoky is any concept of the path of an electron through an
atom. Termination of the smokiness by an act of detection is as close as we can get to
establishing reality at the microscopic level. In that answering of a question-in that
registration-is always implicit a choice, whether tacit or explicit, between comple-
mentary alternatives of what to ask. Complementarity? Choice.

DISTINGUISHABILITY

Distinguishing of the answer is the other half of establishing evidence out of

elementary quantum phenomena. What is the phase difference between the two beams
that fly off from the second half-silvered mirror to the counter on the upper right, one
of these beams being reflected, the other, transmitted? Zero? Then all the photons go
that way. One hundred eighty degrees? Then there are no counts in that photodetector.
Are the two counting rates in the detector equal? Then the phase difference is 90” or
equivalent. However, what if the experiment terminates with 8 yes counts and 6 no
counts (a “no” count in the upper photodetector being an abbreviated way of speaking
of a “yes” count in the other photodetector)? Or 80 yes counts and 60 no counts? Or
800 yes and 600 no? Those three outcomes are progressively more distinct from the
on-average identical-number outcome that goes with a 90” phase difference. Distingui-
shability, in brief, depends on two features of the yes and no counts: their total and
their ratio.
Distinguish from what? “There is no such thing as a fact,” it has been said; “there
is only a fact for a purpose.”” Exaggerated as this statement may be, it nevertheless
points to the why of distinguishability: action. Answer A advises one action; a distinct
answer, B, advises a very different action. Sometimes the statistics do not suffice to
distinguish with the requisite certainty which is the answer. Then more measurements,
more statistics, and more certainty. Sometimes there is not enough time to secure those
extra counts. Then the upcoming decision of how to act has to be taken with an
unacceptable risk. In brief, it is difficult to see how distinguishability can have any
possible point except against a background of action.
308 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

A PROBABILITY AMPLITUDE AND ONE THAT IS COMPLEX:

HOW COME?

For the quantitative determination of distinguishability, the statistician and

geneticist, R. A. Fisher, taught us” as long ago as 1922 that the wrong number is the
probability of a yes or a no in an example like ours, or the probability of blue eyes, grey
eyes, or brown eyes in a population-characterizing example like his. The right number,
he showed, is the square root of the probability of this, that, or the other outcome, or is,
in today’s words, the probability amplitude of the specified answer. As descriptor of a
run of counts, Fisher thus gave us a point (with all its Cartesian coordinates positive)
on the surface of the unit sphere in the space of real numbers-a point in a real Hilbert
space. The dimensionality of this space is equal to the number of distinct outcomes for
the individual count: two for the split-beam experiment, and three for the illustrative
example of the eye colors.
According to a 1980 extension of Fisher’s results by the quantum physicist,
William K. Wootters, the potential distinguishability of two nearly identical sets of
experimental results, or between one set of results and a nearly identical ideal set of
results that might serve as a signal to action, is measured by the angle, 0, in Hilbert
space between the two probability-amplitude vectors.I3 Here, the “potential distin-
guishability” is the quantity that has to be divided by the familiar factor, the square
root, N’‘’, of the total counts, N , so as to obtain the actual distinguishability parameter,
6 = O/N’/*.This parameter (by way of the Gauss function) tells us, for example, that
we run odds of 1,680,675 to 1 of being wrong if, when having observed 800 yes counts
and 600 no counts in the split-beam experiment, we nevertheless proceed to bet on a
phase-shift between the two beams of 90 degrees rather than 81.79 degrees.
How come is it that quantum mechanics, reaching as it does beyond Fisher’s
genetic concerns, gives us probability amplitudes that are not real, but complex? No
one put his finger earlier on the decisive point than E. C. G. St~ecke1berg.I~ Probability
amplitudes that are exclusively real are incompatible, he showed, with Heisenberg’s
principle of indetermini~rn,’~ or, in our translation, with Bohr’s principle of comple-
mentarity? namely, the freedom to choose, and the necessity to choose, which question
we will put to nature.
So much for the sense in which the double demand of complementarity and
distinguishability leads to the heart of quantum theory, the complex probability
amplitude.

THE CHANGE IN THE PHASE OF A PROBABILITY AMPLITUDE

AROUND A CLOSED CIRCUIT AS THE ULTIMATE DEFINER AND
ESSENCE OF FIELDS AND SPACE-TIME GEOMETRY

The difference in phase of an electron’s probability amplitude around a closed

circuit (brought about by a flux of magnetic field through the area bounded by that
circuit) shows up in the shift in the pattern of double-slit interference fringes. The idea
and the experiment were proposed in 1959 by Y . Aharonov and D. Bohm.” This AB
effect is by now observationally well established. Likewise, for gravity and for every
other gauge field, we have reason to believe” that the phase difference in the relevant
WHEELER HOW COME THE QUANTUM? 309

probability amplitude around a closed circuit provides a way to define and measure
that field. The meaning-circuit model translates this conclusion to a new and stronger
proposition: Neither field nor geometry has any existence or significance except insofar
as it is defined, directly or indirectly, by such phase differences.

THE CLOSURE OF THE MEANING CIRCUIT

With particles owing their definition and existence to fields, with fields owing their
definition and existence to phases, with phases owing their definition and existence to
distinguishability and complementarity, and with these features of nature going back
for their origin to the demand for meaning, we have exposed to view (at least in broad
outline) the main features of the underground portion of the model of existence as a
meaning circuit closed by observer-participancy.
Before this would-be model can ever rise to the status of a proper model and be
subject to quantitative analysis, some questions and difficulties require clarification:
(1) What reality does the model ascribe to the physical world before the advent of any
meaning-making community? (2) In what respect does it differ totally from the
familiar anthropic principle on the issue of why the dimensionless constants of nature
have the values they do? (3) What are we to understand by such a term as the
community character of meaning? (4) What is the status of an elementary quantum
phenomenon that is not put to use in the establishment of meaning? ( 5 ) How are we to
reconcile the continuum of the world of physics with the discrete yes-or-no character of
elementary quantum phenomena? (6) How can we ever hope to quantify meaning?
Finally, (7) why a meaning circuit? Why any closed loop at all?
It is appropriate now to take a closer look a t these seven questions, of which every
one has been suggested by our original query, “How come the quantum?”

Millennia without Meaning before the Advent of the Meaning Makers?

Question one: If life and mind and meaning are so important in the scheme of
things, then what is the status of the past? Do the early revolutions of the Milky Way,
the building of the elements, and the formation of the elementary particles-all before
the advent of life-rank lower in reality than today’s wind, snow, and shiver? No.
Through the photons that reach the telescope, we see more clearly a quasar event of six
billion years ago (before there was any life anywhere) than we can perceive the
three-encyclopedia-long sequence of bits in our own DNA, in the here and now.
Does the past exist (and exist only) in the records of the present? If so, then the past
ranks no lower and no higher than the rest of what we call existence. In the words of
Torgny Segerstedt, “reality is theory.”
The quantum brings a new insight, however, to this old conclusion. What is the
polarization of that photon that reaches the eye today from a quasar flash of six billion
years ago? Is it north-south? Or is it NE-SW? Not until we have set the analyzer to the
one orientation or the other have we asked the question. Not until the one or the other
of the appropriately paired photodetectors (the yes-counter and the no-counter) clicks
have we distinguished an answer. Not until then do we have the right to attribute a
polarization to the received photon. This is the respect in which what we ask, or do, in
310 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

the present has an inescapable consequence for what we have the right to say about the
past-even a past long before life. This is the sense in which (through the quantum-
level questions we put to nature) we are participators in the making of what we call
reality.
To turn from the past to the future is to encounter deeper issues. What is the status
of a quantum event so far away that the asking of a question about it and the
distinguishing of an answer take place only one hundred million years from now when
man has been supplanted by, or has evolved into, intelligent life of quite another form?
To attribute a reality to that event now would seem to be premature.
Shall we compare space-time to a great sheet of sandpaper? Shall each glittering
glued-down grain represent an event deterministically fixed in space, fixed in time, and
fixed in character? What a misleading model of existence! How contradictory to
everything the quantum teaches.

Why Are the Dimensionless Constants of Nature Such as to Permit Life?

Question two: How does it come about that the universe ever makes a home for life,
mind, and meaning? Many upholders of the anthropic p r i n ~ i p l epropose
’~ one answer,
which is based on selection. The concept of observer-participancy suggests quite
another, which is founded on construction. Both analyses note that life as we know it
(not only human life, but any carbon-based life) would be forever impossible in a
universe (if such a universe can be imagined) in which one or another of the basic
dimensionless constants of physics differs by a few percent either way from its value
here. Both take as a starting point the 1957 postulate of Robert H. Dicke” that the
Weyl-Eddington-Dirac coincidences between the large dimensionless constants of
physics [cf. reference 19, chapter 41 “were not random, but conditioned by biological
factors.” The one account envisages an infinite ensemble of universes, one differing
from another in the dimensionless constants of physics, with life totally impossible in
the overwhelming majority of these systems. Life, mind, and meaning have only a
peripheral and accidental place in the scheme of things in this view. In the other view,
they are central. Only by their agency is it even possible to construct the universe or
existence, or what we call reality. Those make-believe universes totally devoid of life
are (according to this view) totally devoid of physical sense not merely because they
cannot be observed, but because there is no way to make them.

The Community Character of Knowledge

Question three: Are there then as many pasts, as many presents, and as many
futures as there are observer-participators? A proposal so extravagant overlooks the
community character of everything we call knowledge. Already a t the quantum level,
Niels Bohr warns us of the folly of trying to construct a “quantum language.” He
emphasizes that no measurement is truly a measurement unless the result can be
communicated from one person to another “in plain language.” In a wider context, we
know that meaning itself would be impossible without communication. There is not a
word we speak, a concept we possess, or an idea we conceive that is not rooted in the
larger community.
WHEELER HOW COME THE QUANTUM? 311

In one of her many wonderful writings, Marie Sklodowska Curie tells us that
physics deals with things only-not people. Today, the quantum forces on us a
different outlook. It tells us that existence is not a deterministic machine grinding away
out there. I t is senseless for the uninvolved to try to speak in abstract0 of what is
happening out there a t the microscopic level. Involvement is essential: observer-
participancy. Not until a choice has been made and not until one or another
complementary question has been posed can there be an answer.

The Elementary Quantum Phenomenon That Is Not Put to Use: Does It Count?

Question four: What significance, if any, are we to attribute to an elementary

quantum phenomenon that is not put to use to establish evidence and meaning?
Despite all that we know about measurement theory in the realm of the quantum,
nothing is more puzzling than the linkage between the counter’s click and the
community that makes meaning. An example will illustrate the problem. A detector,
by its irreversible act of amplification, its pulse of current, and the registration of that
pulse, brings to a close an elementary quantum phenomenon. However, the apparatus
is mounted on a space probe traversing the rings of Saturn. A moment later, before the
equipment can beam its message back to earth, a boulder smashes it to atoms. All
opportunity vanishes for the quantum process to contribute to the establishment of
meaning. An event has taken place, but not an event that is put to use.
As a second example, consider a crystal of zinc sulfide thrown up by nature on the
back side of the moon. It stops a cosmic-ray proton. Ten million photons emerge, which
is an irreversible act of amplification if there ever was one. The signal, however,
dissipates out into space. No use is made of it.
In both examples of quantum events not put to use, the amplifying device consists
of some 1022-1025 particles coupled by a complex of electromagnetic interactions. Why
should we attribute to those unused elementary quantum phenomena any special
significance whatsoever? Surely all over the universe, in regions out of sight,
interactions are going on all the time and between particles that are stupendous in
number compared to the count in our two examples. Amidst that tumult, there is many
a concatenation that on anyone’s bookkeeping must count as an elementary quantum
phenomenon that was brought to a close by an irreversible act of amplification. Not
one of these collective electromagnetic twitches is deprived of the status of “phenome-
non” through its lack of all of the credentials of today’s laboratory equipment: no
copper wire, no manufacturer’s trademark, no silicon chip.
There is no irreversible act of amplification that may not later be erased. Not
unless it is put to use in the establishment of meaning does the elementary quantum
phenomenon win any special status. To attribute a unique importance to those
elementary quantum phenomena that happen to be observed appears, however,
unbelievably anthropomorphic, totally anti-Copernican, and utterly in contradiction to
the spirit of physics. Does it diminish the objection to recall that the population of
Africa increases by a million every three weeks? Or to reflect that the number of
observer-participants a millennium from now may well be orders of magnitude greater
than it is today? Or to count on numbers of intercommunicating observer-participants
billions of years in the future still greater by many orders of magnitude? Or to
312 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

recognize the role of the elementary quantum phenomena that they observe in
establishing what we call the reality of the here and now?
To say that this concept of a participatory universe, built on a meaning circuit, is
anti-Copernican is not of much help in arriving a t a rational judgement of it. It is more
to the point to recognize its difficulties and incompleteness. To speak of difficulty is to
come to the problem of the continuum.

The Continuum as an Elaborate Construction of Imagination and Theory That We

Build by Surfacing-Over the World of Elementary Quantum Phenomena

Question five: How can we possibly imagine building the continuous world of
physics on the yes-or-no of quantum phenomena, no matter how numerous they are?”
Physics, after all, presents to us a continuous infinity of locations for particles, a
continuous infinity of field strengths, and a continuous infinity of degrees of freedom of
dynamic space geometry. To construct all that out of the discrete is totally impossi-
ble.
It is one of the great achievements of the mathematics (and mathematical logic) of
recent decades to destroy belief in the existential character of the continuum of natural
numbers. It is an illusion. It is an idealization. It is a dream. With numbers of ever
increasing mathematical sophistication, we can approach that limit ever more closely;
however, we commit a folly if we think we can ever get there. This lesson of the
mathematics of our time carries for physics an inescapable consequence. What we
think of a t the bottom as a world of the continuous simply is not there.
The concept of the participatory universe replaces the continuum. For the “R” of
what we call reality, it gives us a few iron posts of observation, built on elementary
quantum phenomena, between which we ourselves trowel in a continuum of papier-
machi and of plaster of Paris, an elaborate construction compounded of imagination
and theory. In no other way do we know how to reconcile the continuum of everyday
impressions (and of long-established physics) with the discreteness of the means by
which alone, in the last analysis, we acquire our knowledge. How else can the
appearance of a continuum arise except by our own surfacing-over the discrete?

How Are We to Quantify Meaning?

Question six: How can we possibly use the concept of “meaning” in any well-
defined way in the world of physics when the world of philosophy gives us for that term
a definition totally deprived of any quantitative handle? Bit? We know what that is.
Information capacity of a communication channel? That, too, we know how to define
and measure. But meaning? Neither a physics-minded definition nor a way of
measurement is available.
If the motto is correct that every difficulty is an opportunity, then there is no better
place to apply it than “meaning.” Happily for such an enterprise, we know that the
view of science that used to say, “define your terms before you proceed,” is totally out
of date. Nowadays, we recognize that all the laws and theories of physics have this deep
and subtle character, that they both define for us the needful concepts, and that they
make statements about these concepts. Contrariwise, the absence of some body of
WHEELER HOW COME THE QUANTUM? 313

theory, law, and principle deprives us of a means properly to use or even to define
concepts. In any forward step in human knowledge, the theory, concept, law, and
method of measurement-forever inseparable-are born into the world in union.
That forward step has yet to be taken in the realm of meaning. Until it is, we will not
have grasped the why of the quantum.

Why a Circuit Rather than a Foundation?

Question seven: Why speak of a circuit? Why not seek instead for a foundation?
There is an old legend about the foundation that supports the world: Our globe rests
on the back of a great elephant. The elephant stands on the back of a giant tortoise. A
lady in the audience, listening to the speaker’s account of this idea, asks, “On what does
the tortoise stand?” “On the back of a still larger tortoise,” she is told. “And what does
it stand on,” she inquires. The lecturer’s reply is famous: “Tortoises, madam; on and
on, nothing but tortoises.”
How different is the account we give today of the foundation of existence? Matter
is built on molecules. The molecule is built on atoms. The atom has a nucleus. The
nucleus is built on nucleons. The nucleon is built on quarks. The quark is built on fields.
The field is built on geometry of one or another dimension. At each stage of the
unfolding story, a t each clear view of one turtle, we have had to look for the next turtle.
Is there ever to be an end? How can there be an end if we ask always for foundation of
foundation of foundation. . .?
No escape is evident from this view of worlds without end-or tortoises without
end-except in a line of influence that closes on itself, that forms a loop, that makes a
circuit. No model for such a loop is available to us today except one of information-
theoretic character, the model of existence as a meaning circuit.

SURVEY OF THE DIFFICULTIES OF THE MEANING-CIRCUIT MODEL

The model under analysis here accepts that the meaning-creating community of
observer-participants, past, present, and future, is brought into being by the machinery
of the world. However, it goes on to interpret this very world of past, present, and
future, and of space, time, and fields, to be (despite all its apparent continuity,
immensity, and independence from us) a construction of imagination and theory
troweled and plastered in over countably many elementary quantum phenomena,
surfaced over the iron posts of discrete acts of observer-participancy, the ant-like but
magnificent labor of a community stretching from far in the past to even farther in the
future.
The worst model of existence that we possess today is surely one so oriented as this
to observer-participancy, information, and meaning. It is the worst, except we possess
no other model that puts in central place the quantum and the question of “how come
the quantum?”.
Is spacetime an illusion? Time itself not primordial, precise, and supplied from
outside physics, but secondary, approximate, and derived (as elasticity is in today’s
bookkeeping)? Repelled we may be in the beginning by the thought of giving up the
314 ANNAIS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

concept of a spacetime existing out there, but in the end by one decisive circumstance
attracted. No feature of the 4-geometry of physics is more impressive than the
existence of far-distant events separated by a zero interval, and none has more to do
with the structure of all the laws of physics. This intimacy of connection between the
apparently disconnected: how does it come about? Are we not well advised to look for
the connection in the quantum, in the elementary quantum phenomenon, in the great
smoky dragon whose tail is sharply defined, whose bite is also well marked, but which
in between cannot be followed? What better reason is there to say that something
cannot be followed than to recognize that there is nothing there to follow? And thus to
ascribe to multitudes of elementary quantum phenomena those null intervals that tie
existence together so tightly?
No continuum (and mathematical logic denies the concept of the continuum)
means no dimensionality; neither four nor ten nor any higher number. Moreover, the
only feature of a description of nature that could be worse than no dimensionality a t all
would be a dimensionality.22To confront a number, to ask why this number rather than
another number, is to be forced to seek a foundation, after which comes another
foundation question, and then yet another, and so on and on: nothing but turtles.
Can we formulate the laws of physics without recourse to the continuum? We do
not know how. That is perhaps the most conspicuous difficulty of the meaning model.
Is the problem soluble? There is one favorable indication. The laws of electrodynamics,
of geometrodynamics, of chromodynamics, and of string theory all are structuredz3on
the central principle of algebraic geometry, that identity which states that the
boundary of a boundary automatically vanishes. This identity comes into all these
theories twice over: once a t the 1-2-3 dimensional level, and again a t the 2-3-4 level in
the case of the three older theories (and a t the corresponding higher-dimensional levels
in the case of string theory). The identity itself is not tied to any particular
dimensionality. It even leaps across dimensionality in the sense that it applies to a
complex put together out of manifolds of varied dimension. Could this circumstance
indicate that the laws of physics will in the end let themselves be formulated in
dimension-free language?
Every law of physics, to the extent that it is not pure tautology or mathematical
identity, must be at bottom statistical and approximate in its predictions, according to
the view of existence under consideration here. By that forecast, the meaning-circuit
model exposes itself to destruction, that decisive requirement, according to Karl
Popper:4 for any previously untested way of looking a t things.
Charles Darwin, in replying” to a letter from his friend Joseph Dalton Hooker,
wrote, “It is mere rubbish, thinking a t present of the origin of life; one might as well
think of the origin of matter.” Today, thanks not least to Darwin himself, we do
understand (at least in broad outline) the origin and mechanism of life. Large numbers
are absolutely central to that explanation, as we see nowhere more spectacularly than
in the functioning of the “life machine” of Manfred Eigen.26
Numbers of still more stupendous exponent we will hardly be able to escape if,
following the guidelines of the meaning model, we are ever to quantify meaning,
translate continuum physics into the language of the discrete, bridge the chasm
between life and universe, account for the structure of existence, and explain how come
the quantum. In confronting that challenge, we can perhaps gain a little courage from
the famous adage of Philip W. Anderson: “More is different.”
WHEELER HOW COME THE QUANTUM? 315

NOTES AND REFERENCES

I. WHEELER, J. A. 1977. Genesis and observership. In Foundational Problems in the Special

Sciences. R. Butts & J. Hintikka, Eds.: 1-33. Reidel. Dordrecht; 1979. Frontiers of time.
In Problems in the Foundations of Physics. Proceedings of the International School of
Physics “Enrico Fermi” (course 72). N. Toraldo di Francia, Ed.: 395497. North-
Holland. Amsterdam.
2. WHEELER, J. A. 1980. Beyond the black hole. In Some Strangeness in the Proportion: A
Centennial Symposium to Celebrate the Achievements of Albert Einstein. H. Woolf,
Ed.: 341-375. Addison-Wesley. Reading, Massachusetts.
3. WHEELER,J. A. 1984. Bits, quanta, meaning. In Problems in Theoretical Physics. A.
Giovannini, F. Mancini & M. Marinaro, Eds.: 121-141. Univ. of Salerno Press. Salerno,
Italy; 1986. Physics as meaning circuit: three problems. In Frontiers of Non-Equilibrium
Statistical Physics. G. T. Moore & M. 0. Scully, Eds.: 25-32. Plenum. New York.
4. BOHR,N. 1958. Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. Wiley. New York; 1963. Essays
1958-1962 on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. Wiley. New York.
5. FGLLESDAL,D. 1975. Meaning and experience. In Mind and Language. S. Guttenplan,
Ed.: 254. Oxford Univ. Press (Clarendon). Oxford.
6. To John J. Hopfield go the author’s thanks for his explanation of these bit counts.
7. WHEELER,J. A. 1980. Delayed-choice experiments and the Bohr-Einstein dialog. In The
American Philosophical Society and the Royal Society: Papers read at a meeting, June 5,
1980, pp. 9-40. Amer. Phil. SOC. Philadelphia.
8. WHEELER,J. A. 1978. The “past” and the “delayed-choice’’ double-slit experiment. In
Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Theory. A. R. Marlow, Ed.: 9-48. Academic
Press. New York. The concept of a delayed-choice experiment is foreshadowed by a
passing commentary by K. F. von Weizsacker in his “Ortbestimmung eines electrons
durch ein mikroskop” (1931. Z. Phys. 70 114-130) and in an early and solitary sentence
of Niels Bohr: “. . . it . . . can make no difference, as regards observable effects obtainable
by a definite experimental arrangement, whether our plans for constructing and handling
the instruments are fixed beforehand or whether we prefer to postpone the completion of
our planning until a later moment when the particle is already on its way from one
instrument to another.” (1949. Discussion with Einstein on epistemological problems in
atomic physics. In Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist. P. A. Schilpp, Ed.: 230.
Library of Living Philosophers. Evanston. Illinois.)
9. BOHR,N., 1958, emphasizes in reference 4 on p. 88 the “irreversible act of amplification”
and on p. 73 the importance of this act in bringing to a “close” what we call here
(references 1-3.7, 8, and 10) “the elementary quantum phenomenon.”
10. MILLER,W. A. & J. A. WHEELER.1984. Delayed-choice experiments and Bohr’s
elementary quantum phenomenon. In Proceedings of International Symposium on
Foundations of Quantum Mechanics in the Light of New Technology. S. Kamefuchi et
al., Eds.: 140-151. Physical Society of Japan. Kyoto. Via a picture of Field Gilbert, they
symbolize this entity as a smoky dragon, and also illustrate nine different delayed-choice
experiments.
11. Statement attributed to Friedrich Engels (182&1895), but shortened and reworded here.
12. FISHER, R. A. 1922. Proc. R. Soc. Edinburgh 4 2 321. This and two related references are
discussed by W. K. Wootters in reference 13: CAVALLI-SFORZA, L. L. & F. CONTERIO.
1960. Atti Assoc. Genet. Ital. 5: 333; KJMURA, M. 1962. Diffusion Models in Population
Genetics, pp. 23-25. Methuen. London.
13. WOOTTERS,W. K. 1980. Doctoral thesis: The acquisition of information from quantum
measurements. University of Texas at Austin (May 1980). Available from University
Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan.
14. STUECKELBERG, E. C. G. 1960. Helv. Phys. Acta 3 3 727-752; STUECKELBERG, E. C. G. &
M. GUENIN.1961. Helv. Phys. Acta 3 4 621-628.
15. HEISENBERG, W. 1927. Uber den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinema-
tik und Mechanik. Z. Phys. 43: 172-198. (English translation. 1983. In Quantum Theory
and Measurement. J. A. Wheeler & W. H. Zurek, Eds.: 62-84. Princeton Univ. Press.
316 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

Princeton, New Jersey. This book also contains several of the other items cited in the
present bibliography.)
16. BOHR,N. 1928. The quantum postulate and the recent development of atomic theory.
Nature 121: 58g590.
17. AHARONOV, Y. & D. BOHM.1959. Phys. Rev. 115: 485.
18. See, for example: ANANDAN, J. 1977. Phys. Rev. D 1 5 1448-1457; 1980. Int. J. Theor.
Phys. 1 9 537-556; 1980. In Quantum Theory and Gravitation. A. R. Marlow, Ed.: 157-
176. Academic Press. New York.
19. BARROW, J. D. & F. J. TIPLER.1986. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford Univ.
Press (Clarendon). Oxford.
20. DICKE,R. H. 1957. Rev. Mod. Phys. 29 375; 1961. Nature 192 440.
21. For a further discussion of the problem of the continuum, see: WHEELER,J. A. 1986.
Hermann Weyl and the unity of knowledge. Am. Sci. 74 366-375.
22. To Frank Tangherlini, Physics Department, Holy Cross College, Worchester, Massachu-
setts, the author is indebted for a look at the extensive bibliography he has collected on the
changing views over the years as to why the world has 3 (+ 1) dimensions.
23. For a survey, recent new results, and a bibliography, see: KHEYFETS,A. 1986. The boundary
of a boundary principle: a unified approach. Found. Phys. 1 6 483-497.
24. POPPER,K. 1963. Conjectures and Refutations. Routledge & Kegan Paul. London.
25. DARWIN, C. 1919. March 29,1863 letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker. In The Life and Letters
of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter. F. Darwin, Ed.: 203.
Appleton. New York/London. The author thanks Frederick Burckhardt for locating this
passage.
26. EIGEN,M. 1976. Das Spiel. Piper. Miinchen; also in subsequent publications.