John Wheeler Saw the Tear in Reality

h/t Jason Hu

Until his dying days, the giant of 20th-century physics obsessed over the underpinnings of space and time, and how we can all share the same version of them.

By Amanda Gefter

Contributing Writer

September 25, 2024

When Johnny Wheeler was 4 years old, splashing in the bathtub in Youngstown, Ohio, he looked up at his mother and asked, “What happens when you get to the end of things?” The question would haunt him for the rest of his life. What happens when you get to the bottom of space? What happens when you get to the edge of time? It would lead him to suggest that space-time can’t be the true fabric of the universe. It would compel him, even in his final days, to search for some deeper reality beneath space-time and to wonder whether, somehow, that reality loops back to us.