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John Wheeler saw the tear in reality
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.
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. He imagined waves of gravity folding themselves into compact spheres that would look like elementary particles from the outside, while on the inside they’d be made of nothing but empty space, “mass without mass.” He called them “ geons.” They would whittle down the ingredients of the universe to just one. No one had ever used general relativity in this way, bending and contorting space-time until the rest of physics poured right out, rendering the universe full of strange twists and tunnels so new they didn’t have names.
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