Motivations Part 2, Wheeler
I parsed through the “From The Big Bang to The Big Crunch“ paper and the first couple sections of the “Beyond The Black Hole“ paper. My impressions so far are that Wheeler was a bit of a mystic, he was not the “shut up and calculate“ kind of physicist but more the “how are things really?“ kind of physicist, and unlike many he was not this way naïvely.
Faith in the search of solutions
Wheelers “spirit of solution”, if you will, is more living and ambitious than cold and calculating. He believed you need to believe that a solution is possible and can be found, that you must have faith and imagination. This echoes Einstein’s often quoted “Imagination is more important than knowledge“ and given that Wheeler was heavily influenced by Einstein (directly, they were personal friends), this is unsurprising. He also mentions Einstein’s rules for work:
Out of clutter, find simplicity
From discord make harmony; and finally
In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity
He also makes the comment that “Universities have students to educate professors“, further reflecting a sort of holistic optimism in the search for solutions.
Law Without Law
The fundamental question - or one of them - that Wheeler was occupied with philosophically was “how this universe, coming into being from a Big Bang, developed its laws of operation. I call this "Law without Law" … How can we possibly imagine the universe with all its regularities and its laws coming into being out of something utterly helter-skelter, higgledy-piggledy and random?“. There is a mention of Order from Disorder in the margins but there does seem to be a subtle difference, especially if considering the laws themselves to “actually exist” rather than being illusory.
Ice Cave and The Gates of Time
Wheeler calls the Big Bang and The Big Crunch the “Gates of Time”. He also coined the term “Black Hole” and considers black holes coincident with the Big Crunch. The Russians were using the term “Frozen Star” at the time but Wheeler noted that this was a term fitting for an external perspective and he wanted the whole picture, internal, external, and holistic. He gives a cave filling with water as an analogy for the universe and its lifetime. The floor and ceiling of the cave are the Big Bang and Big Crunch respectively. Black holes are like the stalactites hanging down from the ceiling, which brings the gates of time and the big bang into coincidence. As the water level rises, it meets the ceiling at different points due to the stalactites hanging down, leading to holes in the surface of the water where it’s penetrated by the earlier sections of the Big Crunch, we call these black holes. Now note: in the metaphor he actually gave, the cave is an ice cave. If the water is supplied by the melting ice, and further if the cave was brought into being by the ice sheering itself apart in places under its own force, then the entire picture is coincident. This metaphorically explains the whole lifetime of everything from the actions of a single substance/entity - the great ice. This illustrates Wheelers hope and propensity for more holistic and explanatory structures, rather than atomistic and merely descriptive ones.
Three Beautiful Theories and One Old One
Wheeler says that in our day (his day) of physics there are three “Beautiful Theories”: Maxwell’s Electrodynamics, Einstein’s Relativity, and Yang-Mills Theory. But! He observes, the current state of these theories is reminiscent of that of the old Elasticity Theory. In Elasticity Theory energy functioned like the square of deformation of a solid leading to two options: Square the deformation tensor and take its trace, or take its trace and then square it. In practice both are used leading to something to the effect: E = a*Tr(T**2) + b(Tr(T)*2). This means that in the whole course of Elasticity Theory there are but two free constants, and the whole of the theory is developed accordingly, complete with all the beautiful symmetries associated with beautiful theories. However this theory obscures the underlying mechanism behind the law: Through no application of the laws of elasticity are molecular forces evident, and as we can guess, Wheeler wans not just descriptive law but mechanism, and ultimate Is. Our three beautiful theories already show signs of going the way of elasticity theory, through the requirement of embeddability (see the paper in the resources section), all three of these theories can be wrapped up in one mathematical explanation. But what is the next Is we may find?
The Big Crunch
Wheeler was evidently a fan of the Big Crunch, which has since fallen out of favor. It looks like the CTMU accounts for this, but given Wheeler’s influence on Langan it seems wise to understand his perspective even if current day physicists would consider his view in error. We also now know black holes have a lifespan and are not forever.
Remark
Hopefully this gives a flavor of Wheeler, and hopefully we can feel intimations of how this influenced the CTMU. Langan makes heavy use of the Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links paper, but we have yet to get to that.
