Wheeler quote - source wanted
Arnold Neumaier
At the end of http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/constants.html
John Baez quotes a remark of Wheeler:
Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful,
that when we grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium -
we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?
How could we have been so stupid for so long?
- John Archibald Wheeler
Does anyone know the source of the quote?
Please reply to my email address Arnold....@univie.ac.at
Arnold Neumaier
http://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~neum/
[Moderator's note: just in case anyone's wondering, I don't
know the answer to this. - jb]
Stephen Speicher
> At the end of http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/constants.html
> John Baez quotes a remark of Wheeler:
>
> Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful,
> that when we grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium -
> we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?
> How could we have been so stupid for so long?
>
> - John Archibald Wheeler
>
> Does anyone know the source of the quote?
> Please reply to my email address Arnold....@univie.ac.at
"Of all the indications that existence at bottom has a
simplicity beyond anything we imagine today, there is
none more inspiring than the unsurpassed simplicity of
gravity, as we now see it. Someday, surely, we will see
the principle underlying existence as so simple, so
beautiful, so obvious that we will all say to each
other, 'Oh, how could we all have been so blind, so
long.'"
--John Archibald Wheeler, "A Journey Into Gravity and
Spacetime," _Scientific American Library_, 1990.
--
Stephen
s...@compbio.caltech.edu
Printed using 100% recycled electrons.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Greg Weeks
> that when we grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium -
> we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?
> How could we have been so stupid for so long?
>
> - John Archibald Wheeler
Is that how people reacted to, say, Maxwell's equations? To Gibbs
ensembles? To special relativity? To general relativity? To quantum
mechanics? To quantum field theory?
As a student, I never found myself thinking "How could people have been
so stupid for so long?" Wheeler is perhaps expecting the universe to speak
in ways that it has never done before.
Greg
Tim May
<Arnold....@univie.ac.at> wrote:
> At the end of http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/constants.html
> John Baez quotes a remark of Wheeler:
>
> Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful,
> that when we grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium -
> we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?
> How could we have been so stupid for so long?
>
> - John Archibald Wheeler
>
>
> Does anyone know the source of the quote?
....
> [Moderator's note: just in case anyone's wondering, I don't
> know the answer to this. - jb]
I tracked down this quote using Google Groups and found this 1993
comment from, oddly enough, Jack Sarfatti:
"The above and some of the following quotes are by John Wheeler in his
article "How Come the Quantum?" (Ann NY Acad Sci, 480 p.304 , 1986)
>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 millenium - we grasp it, we will all say to each other, how could it
Phil Gibbs
> Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful,
> that when we grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium -
> we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?
> How could we have been so stupid for so long?
>
> - John Archibald Wheeler
>Does anyone know the source of the quote?
>Please reply to my email address Arnold....@univie.ac.at
It is in his article "How Come the Quantum?" which has been published in
various places.
He also said something very similar in another article "It From Bit"
which again has been reproduced in various books
Ralph E. Frost
news:3D494522...@univie.ac.at...
Isn't the notion taken, or also present in Fritjof Capra's ...Tao of
Phyjics.., or lifted out of the Eastern mediations?
Alternatively, is anyone on e-mail tems with Weinberg, Steven? AKA ...
author of _Dreams of Final Theory_, Pantheon Books, 1992, who, on p 236,
refers to the same notion crediting Wheeler....
"On the other hand, Wheeler one remarked that, when we come to the final
laws of nature, we will wonder why they were not obvious from the beginning.
I suspect that Wheeler may be correct, but only because by then we will
have been trained by centuries of scientific failures and successes to find
these laws obvious. Even so, in however attentuated a form, I think the old
question, Why? will still be with us. The Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick
has grappled with this problem and suggests that instead of trying to deduce
the final theory on the basis of pure logic, we should search instead for
arguments that would make it somehow more satisfying than a mere brute
force."
--
- Ralph Frost
http://www.refrost.com
Use more robust symbols
Seek a thought worthy of speech.
"...Love one another..." John 15:12
Charles Francis
<greg...@earthlink.net> writes:
A few examples I have come across where people really did think
something like "how could we have been so stupid for so long".
Darwinian evolution - after all people had been modifying breeds in
captivity for millennia.
Kepler - for years did not even investigate the possibility of
elliptical motion because he thought that if it were that simple
Archimedes or Aristarchus would have had the answer.
Newton's laws, with hindsight, seem almost the ultimate in simple laws
encapsulating what seems to be almost inevitable truth, yet before
Newton dynamics was just a whole morass of conflicting truths, half
truths and fallacy - in my view not unlike the situation today in
quantum field theory.
Other cases of scientific revolution, like the theory of oxygen, do not
require any complicated thought, just a shift in perceptions. Indeed
reader's of Kuhn may think that the usual process is for the
complication to exist when science is in crisis, not when the crisis is
resolved, often by a simple idea.
On the whole I think Wheeler has good reason, arguing by analogy, to
think that history shows that the most intractable scientific problems
often have simple solutions.
Regards
--
Charles Francis
Daryl McCullough
were very impressive, there are several of their beliefs about which
we wonder "how could anyone have thought that"?
One was the idea that vision consists of a ray coming from your eyes
to the object being looked at. That doesn't make a bit of sense, when
you think about it, but many Greek thinkers believed (perhaps including
Aristotle). This issue was straightened out by the Arab
scientist Ibn al-Haitham
(http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/981005/1998100554.html)
"His major contribution to optic science is the correct and accurate
clarification of the mechanism of vision. He proved that vision
realizes objects and the eye sees them by rays reflected from these
objects to the eye and not the other way round."
--
Daryl McCullough
Ithaca, NY
Bill Pringlemeir
Daryl> ancient Greeks were very impressive, there are several of
Daryl> their beliefs about which we wonder "how could anyone have
Daryl> thought that"?
Daryl> One was the idea that vision consists of a ray coming from
Daryl> your eyes to the object being looked at. That doesn't make a
Daryl> bit of sense, when you think about it, but many Greek thinkers
Daryl> believed (perhaps including Aristotle). This issue was
Daryl> straightened out by the Arab scientist Ibn al-Haitham
Daryl> (http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/981005/1998100554.html)
[snip]
Actually, this is a perfect example of what Wheeler was talking about.
It does seem to anyone with modern knowledge that the Greeks were
smoking something when they reasoned this. However, I am reading "The
history of Mathematics" by Ball. [He appears to have a racial bias
against Arabs and Hindus in my opinion]. In it, he explains the logic
behind this.
"Why is it that you can not see a needle on the floor when you step
on it? Yet when you look closely, it is there."
If the needle was the source of the light, shouldn't you see it. Why
must you concentrate your gaze to see the object. The reasoning does
discount a large unknown part; the visual processing of our brains.
However, the Greeks believed in reason more than anything (even
experiment... move forward to Bacon, Galileo, and Newton for that).
The also didn't know much at all about the human brain, and we may not
currently know that much about it.
When you do read the argument base on the idea of "rays come from your
eyes", you no longer thing "how could anyone have thought that?". A
similar notion is Maxwells concept that all EM was based on
wheels... To tie this back to the thread, I think that almost all
scientific discoveries seem obvious and elegant after the fact.
Regards,
Bill Pringlemeir.
--
Have you ever used a conference call to become one with characters
from Barney and Friends? Or thought it was worthless to have six
empty deodorant cans to defend against the Republican? You will. And
the company that will bring it to you: AT&T.
Phil Gibbs
<spam_a...@sympatico.ca> writes:
>the Greeks believed in reason more than anything (even
>experiment... move forward to Bacon, Galileo, and Newton for that).
It is recorded that Alhazen of Persia 965-1039 correctly understood the
basic principles of optics and that he based his knowledge on
experiments. That was a couple of hundred years before Bacon.
Tim S
A lot of people were aware of the problems, but the alternative view (that
something came into the eye) also had problems. For instance, the 'outgoing
ray' model explained in a very simple way why geometric optics worked. The
'incoming image' model didn't, until a lot of supplementary knowledge had
been added, in particular an understanding of what an image is, how one is
formed, and what role light plays in vision.
For a long time, people didn't understand that it is light rays that go into
the eye -- in fact, a lot of people didn't accept that light travelled at
all, certainly not in rays. People wondered how images given off by large
objects like mountains could be shrunk down to get into the eye, and how
these images knew where the eyes were, so they could get to them. The
outgoing ray model had none of these problems. It took a long time to
understand that light rays scattered in all directions, and carried the
information that could be reconstructed into an image without needing to
carry the image as a coherent physical object, and that only a tiny fraction
of the light rays needed to go into each eye. It was ibn al-Haitham (known
in the Latin West as Alhazen) who finally showed that this sort of idea
could be built into a coherent theory which combined the best of the
geometric optics tradition and the 'incoming image' tradition.
He entirely failed to understand how the eye worked, however, despite making
some improved observations on its anatomy. It was Kepler who first correctly
explained the optics of the eye, the role of the cornea, lens, and retina,
the formation of an image, etc.
It's easy to forget just how ignorant people were and how difficult it is to
know which observations are important and which are confusing distractions
(e.g. the fact that some animals' eyes appear to glow in the dark --
actually due to reflection -- and the once widely-believed myth that lynxes
can see in the dark).
See, e.g.:
author = {David C. Lindberg},
title = {Theories of Vision From Al-Kindi to Kepler},
publisher = {University of Chicago Press},
year = 1976}
or, for a more popular and wide-ranging account,
author = {David Park},
title = {The Fire Within the Eye},
publisher = {Princeton University Press},
year = 1997}
Tim
Mark
>One was the idea that vision consists of a ray coming from your eyes
>to the object being looked at. That doesn't make a bit of sense, when
>you think about it, but many Greek thinkers believed (perhaps including
>Aristotle).
Actually, a lot of people STILL latently believe that and act on that belief.
It is still, for instance, considered by many to be some kind of intrusion or
invasion of privacy if you stare at a person for too long, even in a public
setting -- as if the mere act of looking somehow projects eye-beams into the
other person's private space.
It's considered by many to be an intrusion to merely perceive (possibly with
the aid of prosthetics or scanning devices) emissions that are out in a public
place, coming from someone; again, as if the mere act of perceiving something
casts intrusive eye-beams (or scan-beams) into the person's private space.
The main difficulty is always debunking this persistent myth and pointing
out that the real imposition (if there's one to be had) lies on the part
of the perceived, for casting their emissions into the private space of the
perceiver; not on the part of the perceiver. In general, it's not an
imposition either way since the emission is normally involuntary and
unstoppable.
[Moderator's note: Any legal or ethical arguments ensuing from this
should probably go to another newsgroup or to e-mail. -MM]
Daniel Weston
how difficult and agonizing has been scientific advancement, and how
many tedious centuries it took to find out what we now take for granted.
A thousand years from now they will look back on our generation and
wonder why there was so much confusion and travail and misunderstanding
over such a simple thing as gravity. (maybe)