Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn (4 page)

I headed over to the check-in table, peeking at name tags as I went, finally attaching faces to what had for us become household names. I scanned the table for my badge. There it was:
Amanda Gefter
, Manhattan
Magazine.
Next to it, a blank for my plus one. As I leaned over to grab them, I accidentally bumped shoulders with the man next to me. “Sorry,” I said, glancing up. I blushed and sprinted giddily back to my father. “Oh my God!” I squealed. “I just touched Brian Greene!”

As we took our seats in the conference room we looked around in awe, jabbing each other with our elbows and whispering things like, “Holy shit! That's Alan Guth!” and “Max Tegmark is sitting right in front of us!” We were awestruck, starstruck, dumbstruck. These people had played the lead characters in our conversations for years, and now we were sitting among them. I nudged my father and pointed. There, taking a seat in the front row, was the man whom everyone was here to celebrate: John Archibald Wheeler.

Physicist, philosopher, poet, prophet, legend. Even at ninety, Wheeler had a boyish face. Sweet-looking, with a mischievous gleam in his eye. As a younger man, Wheeler had studied quantum physics in Copenhagen under Niels Bohr, and taught the first course on general relativity at Princeton, where he strolled the tree-lined streets discussing the nature of reality with Einstein. With Bohr, he helped work out the physics of nuclear fission, and he went on to work on the development of the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project and the hydrogen bomb after that. He coined the terms
black hole
and
wormhole.
He led countless students to profound discoveries—students including Richard Feynman, Hugh Everett, Jacob Bekenstein, and Kip Thorne. He emphasized the importance of “ideas for ideas,” fearless in the face of mystery.

Four quintessential Wheeler questions served as the inspiration
for the symposium: Why the quantum? It from bit? A participatory universe? And how come existence? My father and I were sure that answering them would be key to solving the mystery.

Why the quantum?
The thing about quantum mechanics was that it offered up a picture of reality that didn't seem to jibe with the world as we know it: a picture in which effects had no causes, observers determined the observed, and everywhere you looked there were boxes full of simultaneously dead and alive cats. Then again, maybe quantum mechanics didn't offer up any picture of reality at all. Maybe it just took the ones we had and blurred them beyond recognition. The theory allowed physicists to make extraordinarily accurate predictions, but the predictions alone provided no clues as to what the whole thing meant. Wheeler had lived through quantum theory's founding and had been there in the thick of it as physicists such as Bohr, Feynman, Everett, and Einstein tried desperately to make sense of the bizarre facts unfolding before them. With no principles to stand on, physicists' most successful theory just sort of hovered there, looking arbitrarily weird, a weirdness to which many surrendered, waving white flags, muttering, “Shut up and calculate.” But Wheeler refused to surrender. He knew that particles' seemingly arbitrary behaviors had to be some kind of clue. The weirdness had to be telling us something.

It from bit
was Wheeler's slogan for the idea that the physical universe is made not of matter but of information. In quantum theory, making an observation is equivalent to asking a yes-or-no question. Is the particle here or elsewhere? Is the cat dead or alive? Wheeler suggested that the very posing of the question
creates
a bit of information, and that such bits were the fundamental building blocks of reality.
“The universe and all that it contains (‘it') may arise from the myriad yes-no choices of measurement (the ‘bits'),” Wheeler wrote. “Information may not be just what we
learn
about the world. It may be what
makes
the world.” It was a pretty weird idea, given our intuition that the fundamental building blocks of matter are just smaller pieces of matter, like particles. Of course, as Mr. McAfoos had taught me, particles are 99 percent empty. Still, you'd hope that this meager 1 percent would somehow be enough to fortify a world. But according to Wheeler, even the 1 percent was made of nothing sturdier than an observer-elicited yes or no.
A house is
made of bricks but the bricks are made of information?
I wrote in my notebook. How could it be that when we look closely enough at the physical world we find something that's not physical at all, as if this whole universe were a kind of virtual reality? Then again, what's the difference? What could “physical” even mean?

A participatory universe?
If measurements built the universe bit by bit, as Wheeler suspected, then observers were somehow implicated in the creation of reality—a radical picture that, if true, would mean that ours was a participatory universe. As the physicist Paul Davies wrote,
“Wheeler seeks to … turn the conventional explanatory relationship: matter → information → observers on its head, and place observership at the base of the explanatory chain: observers → information → matter.” That was the notion that had struck a chord in my father and me—could it somehow be that observers turn nothing into something? The idea seemed impossible from the start, because where would the observers come from? What would even count as an observer? Surely it didn't have to be conscious or human … but what?

Finally,
how come existence?
That was the big one. Why is there something rather than nothing? It was the question that had taunted my father for years, the one that had set our journey in motion and led us to crash this conference in search of an answer. How come existence? How come, indeed.

“I had the good fortune of having my first and only heart attack last January,” Wheeler told the captivated audience when he finally took the stage, speaking slowly and quietly, his quavering voice betraying not only his age but his urgency. “I call it good fortune because it taught me that there's a limited amount of time left and I better concentrate on one thing: How come existence? How come the quantum? Maybe those questions sound too philosophical, but maybe philosophy is too important to be left to the philosophers.”

When the session ended, a swarm of physicists descended on Wheeler, who remained seated in the front row, smiling and nodding as one physicist after the next sat down to speak with him. We waited patiently in our seats, biding our time. Eventually our moment arrived. The crowd was thinning, so we made our way down to the front row. This was it. This was why we had come.

John Archibald Wheeler (left) and my father (right) at the Science and Ultimate Reality Conference
,
2002
A. Gefter

We bent forward, and each of us shook his hand. “I'm Warren Gefter; this is my daughter, Amanda. She's here covering the conference for
Manhattan
magazine. We're so thrilled to meet you,” my father said. Wheeler nodded, but it appeared as if he couldn't hear and was too polite to say so. My father leaned in closer and spoke louder. “We have a question we've always wanted to ask you,” he said, over-enunciating every word. “If observers create reality, where do the observers come from?”

Wheeler smiled. “From physics. From the universe. I like to say”—he paused, trying to find the words—“that the universe is a self-excited circuit.”

My father nodded appreciatively, then pensively. “So it's all from nothing?”

Again Wheeler appeared not to hear, so my father asked once more, louder still. “So it's all from nothing?”

Wheeler nodded and spoke slowly. “There is a principle that says the boundary of a boundary is zero.”

Just then some physicists turned to speak with him, so we thanked him, told him what an honor it was, smiled, and walked away.

The meeting had let out for the day, so we decided to head outside and wander around Princeton. The crisp springtime air seemed electric. Walking down the street, manically chattering about the people we had seen and the ideas we had heard, we felt we were now a part of something, even if we hadn't been invited.

“We spoke to Wheeler!” my father said, looking dazed and grinning in disbelief.

“Hell, yeah, we did!” We slapped a high five.

We found our way to Mercer Street, the quiet road where Einstein had lived during his years in Princeton, where he and Wheeler had walked, discussing the great cosmic mysteries. It suddenly struck me as really amusing that Einstein had lived in New Jersey.
New Jersey?
It's like spotting Shakespeare eating a burger at Wendy's, or finding out that Plato wasn't really Greek but Canadian.

We found Einstein's former house—112 Mercer—and stood side by side in front of it, gazing ahead. We stood in awe, but the house stood in modesty. It was quaint and unassuming, painted small-town, ironic, anonymous white. But it was undergoing some sort of renovation and the front steps were cordoned off by yellow tape, like a murder scene.

My father pointed to the tape. “Maybe that guy he was always dropping off the roof in his thought experiments finally met his doom.”

I knew that Einstein had specifically asked Princeton to keep the home as an ordinary residence rather than turning it into some kind of landmark or museum. “This house will never become a place of pilgrimage where the pilgrims come to worship the bones of the saint,” he had said. But I didn't feel too bad. With all that yellow tape, we could barely worship the front porch. Besides, the pathologist who did Einstein's autopsy had stolen his brain. Compared to that, standing in reverence on his front lawn hardly seemed like a violation.

Trespassing at Einstein's Princeton home
W. Gefter

My father had once shown me an old beat-up hardback book of Einstein's essays on relativity that his father had given to him when he was just a kid. He told me how he tried to read it when he was only ten or eleven years old, how he would pretend to understand it. He kept the book on a shelf in his bedroom throughout his childhood; he would stare at it, flip through its pages, and wish he could untangle its meaning because he was sure it held the promise of some shining truth. Now, staring at the house, the March sun glistening off the white paint, I felt as if I had stepped out of my own head and into something vastly larger than myself. I looked at my father and had the sense that he was at last on the path he had always privately desired to tread. And me? I just wanted to follow.

We watched the house intently, as if Einstein were going to come strolling out the front door at any minute, sticking out his tongue and yelling at us to get the hell off his lawn.

Is that house really made of information? I wondered. Is that information made by me? By us? Is anything what it seems? Is any of this real?

I knew that the world around me had to be more than it seemed. Physics clearly bolstered that view—after all, a table was mostly empty space, and if you zoomed in on the empty space, it dissolved into something else, something unknown. Look closely enough at anything, and everything we know seems to fall away, leaving behind … what? Some basic ingredient of reality? Something as intangible as information? I didn't need science to tell me that appearances were deceiving—I knew it in my bones. I had known it since the day my father told me it was all an illusion. I knew it because without it, I wasn't going to make it. I couldn't bear the notion that reality stopped at wedding cakes and rubber-band balls and suburban homes. If the world in front of my eyes was the be-all and end-all of existence, I thought, then count me out. I needed mystery. I needed to know that there was more to the story.

I suspected my father needed that, too. Though he would never admit it, it was becoming increasingly obvious to me that his quiet, professional, suburban life wasn't cutting it. His inner rebel—that shirtless hippie sitting lotus-style and meditating on the nature of self and existence, the one who had been silenced by career pressures and the arbitrary demands of adulthood—was looking for a chance to emerge, and he glimpsed that chance in physics. And in me.