Peering Through the Gates of Time

It’s all come down to this.

In one corner is Dr. John Archibald Wheeler, 90, professor emeritus of physics at Princeton and the University of Texas, armed with a battery of hearing aids, fistfuls of colored chalk, unfailing courtesy, a poet’s flair for metaphor, an indomitable sense of duty and the company of a ghost army of great thinkers.

In the other is a “great smoky dragon,” which is how Dr. Wheeler refers sometimes to one of the supreme mysteries of nature. That is the ability, according to the quantum mechanic laws that govern subatomic affairs, of a particle like an electron to exist in a murky state of possibility — to be anywhere, everywhere or nowhere at all — until clicked into substantiality by a laboratory detector or an eyeball.

Dr. Wheeler suspects that this quantum uncertainty, as it is more commonly known, is the key to understanding why anything exists at all, how something, the universe with its laws, can come from nothing. Or as he likes to put it in the phrase that he has adopted as his mantra: “How come the quantum? How come existence?”

Standing by the window in his third-floor office in Princeton’s Jadwin Hall recently, Dr. Wheeler pointed out at the budding trees and the green domes of the astronomy building in the distance. “We’re all hypnotized into thinking there’s something out there,” he said. NY Times