John Archibald Wheeler, The Physicist Who Made Information A Foundation

He did not coin “black hole”. Robert Dicke used the comparison first and the journalist Ann Ewing put it in print on 18 January 1964. Wheeler adopted it in December 1967 and his standing made it stick. The weapons work was real and he never disowned it. He and Bohr published the theory of fission on the day Germany invaded Poland, he diagnosed the xenon poisoning that stalled the Hanford reactor, and from 1951 he ran Princeton’s thermonuclear programme. Delayed choice is not retrocausality. The 2007 experiment confirmed his prediction exactly. The 2016 review says plainly that no signal into the past is needed to explain any of it. “It from bit” is a claim about what a quantity is. It says a physical thing derives its existence from answers an instrument gives to yes-or-no questions. It does not say the universe is a computer, and the observer is any apparatus that makes an irreversible record. He supervised many-worlds into existence and rejected it. Everett’s 1957 thesis was written under him and published with his supportive note attached. By 1980 Wheeler was calling it too great a load of metaphysical baggage. The information view is not settled physics. Landauer’s own…