Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn (63 page)

“This weekend,” the article read
Dennis Overbye, “Peering Through the Gates of Time,”
New York Times
, March 12, 2002.

Heidegger said that the question
Martin Heidegger, “The Quest for Being,” in
Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre
, ed. Walter Kauffman (New York: Meridian, 1956), 245.

“no one,” wrote Henning Genz, “has ever given us an answer to what exactly defines nothing”
Henning Genz,
Nothingness: The Science of Empty Space
(Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 1999), 5.

“Can one only hope some day to understand ‘genesis' via”
John Archibald Wheeler,
At Home in the Universe
(Woodbury, NY: AIP Press, 1996), 24–26.

“The universe and all that it”
John Archibald Wheeler,
Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 340–41.

“Wheeler seeks to … turn the conventional”
Paul Davies, “John Archibald Wheeler and the Clash of Ideas,” in
Science and Ultimate Reality
, eds. John D. Barrow, Paul Davies, and Charles Harper Jr. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 10.

“It is true that the universe”
Lee Smolin,
Four Roads to Quantum Gravity
(New York: Basic Books, 2001), 17.

“a radical revision of our attitude”
Niels Bohr, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?”
Physical Review
48 (October 15, 1935): 697.

“may be paralleled with the fundamental”
Ibid.

“The ‘paradox' is only a conflict”
Richard Feynman,
The Feynman Lectures on Physics
(New York: Basic Books, 1965), 3:18–19.

The most detailed and precise map
Dennis Overbye, “Cosmos Sits for Early Portrait, Gives Up Secrets,”
New York Times
, February 12, 2003, A34.

“NASA today released the best”
NASA, “WMAP Results,” press release 03-064, February 11, 2003.

“If an anthropic principle,
why
”
John Archibald Wheeler,
At Home in the Universe
(Woodbury, NY: AIP Press, 1996), 38.

“Life's a Sim and Then You're”
Michael Brooks, “Life's a Sim and Then You're Deleted,”
New Scientist
, July 27, 2002, 48.

“If we live in a simulated reality”
John Barrow, “Glitch!”
New Scientist
, June 7, 2003, 44.

“something deeply hidden”
Albert Einstein, “Autobiographical Notes,” in
Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist
, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp,
Library of Living Philosophers
7 (Evanston, IL: Library of Living Philosophers, 1949).

“The most symmetric
f
phase of the”
Frank Wilczek and Betsy Devine,
Longing for the Harmonies
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 275.

“No search has ever disclosed”
John Archibald Wheeler,
At Home in the Universe
(Woodbury, NY: AIP Press, 1996), 24–26.

“Any exploration of the concept”
Ibid., 27.

“Unless the blind dice of”
Ibid., 45.

“Mice and men and all on”
Ibid., 306.

“Spacetime,” Wheeler wrote, “often considered to”
Ibid., 282–83.

“we used to think that the world”
John Archibald Wheeler, “Time Today,” in
Physical Origins of Time Asymmetry
, eds. J. J. Halliwell, J. Pérez-Mercader, and W. H. Zurek (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 19.

“There is no more remarkable feature”
Wheeler,
At Home in the Universe
, 42.

“Except via those time-leaping quantum phenomena”
Ibid., 309.

“Can we ever expect to understand”
Ibid., 310.

In 1989 Worrall published an article
John Worrall, “Structural Realism: The Best of Both Worlds?”
Dialectica
43, 1–2 (1989): 99–124.

“Equations express relations, and if the”
Henri Poincaré,
Science and Hypothesis
(New York: Dover, 1952), 162.

“ ‘The notion of reality in the' ”
Max Born, “Physical Reality,”
Philosophical Quarterly
3, 11 (1953): 139.

“ ‘The shadow of the circle will' ”
Ibid., 143.

“ ‘The projection (the shadow in our example)' ”
Ibid., 144.

“ ‘The main advances in the conceptual' ”
Ibid.

“ ‘I think the idea of invariant' ”
Ibid., 149.

“ ‘That these were two, in principle different' ”
Albert Einstein, “Fundamental Ideas and Methods of the Theory of Relativity, Presented in Their Development,”
1920, in
Collected Papers of Albert Einstein
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), vol. 7, doc. 31.

“Physics is an attempt”
Albert Einstein, “Autobiographical Notes,” in
Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist
, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp,
Library of Living Philosophers 7
(Evanston, IL: Library of Living Philosophers, 1949).

“I believe that nature”
Albert Einstein letter to Raymond Benenson, January 31, 1946, Albert Einstein Archives, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“One therefore suspects it is wrong”
John Archibald Wheeler,
At Home in the Universe
(Woodbury, NY: AIP Press, 1996), 24–26.

“I always feel like a criminal”
John Archibald Wheeler,
Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 314.

“I take it to be true”
Albert Einstein, “On the Method of Theoretical Physics,” the Herbert Spencer lecture delivered at Oxford University, June 10, 1933, trans. Don A. Howard in “Einstein's Philosophy of Science,”
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(ed. Edward N. Zalta, 2010),
plato.​stanford.​edu/​archives/​sum2010/​entries/​einstein-​philscience
.

“interpreted their results as an indication”
Raphael Bousso, “Adventures in de Sitter Space,” in
The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology: Celebrating Stephen Hawking's 60th Birthday
, eds. G. W. Gibbons, E. P. S. Shellard, and S. J. Rankin (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 545.

“Spacetime itself may be reinterpreted as”
Edward Witten, “Reflections on the Fate of Spacetime,”
Physics Today
, April 1996, 24–30.

“a new and stronger relativity principle”
Leonard Susskind,
The Cosmic Landscape
(New York: Little, Brown, 2005), 336.

“Just as Darwin and Wallace”
Steven Weinberg, “Living in the Multiverse,” in
Universe or Multiverse?
ed. Brandon Carr (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 39.

“Faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism”
Christoph Schönborn, “Finding Design in Nature,”
New York Times
, July 7, 2005, A23.

“Martin Rees said that he was”
Weinberg,
Living in the Multiverse
, 40.

“that horror of the spectral duplication”
Jorge Luis Borges, “Covered Mirrors,” in
Collected Fictions
(New York: Viking, 1998), 297.

“in which the histories of the universe”
Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog, “Populating the Landscape: A Top-Down Approach,”
Physical Review D
73 (2006): 123527.

“but cosmology poses questions of a”
Ibid.

“the universe would be completely self-contained”
Stephen Hawking,
A Brief History of Time
(New York: Bantam Books, 1988), 141.

“This might suggest that the so-called”
Ibid., 144.

“The past has no existence”
John Archibald Wheeler,
At Home in the Universe
(Woodbury, NY: AIP Press, 1996), 126.

“It does little good to second-guess”
John Archibald Wheeler,
Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 20.

“And when he gets that new idea”
Deborah Byrd, “At Home in the Universe,”
Alcade
, Jan./Feb. 1978, 30.

“I don't care if you agree”
Leonard Susskind,
The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics
(New York: Back Bay Books, 2008), 254.

“To be? To be?”
Niels Bohr quoted by John Archibald Wheeler, “Quantum Theory Poses Reality's Deepest Mystery,”
Science News
, May 12, 2008.
www.s​cie​nce​news.​org/​view/​generic/​id/​32008/​des​cri​pti​on/​John_​Wh​eel​er​_1911​-2008
.

“ ‘What's the good of Mercator's North Poles' ”
Lewis Carroll,
The Annotated Hunting of the Snark
, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).

“ ‘The Snark is a poem about' ”
Gardner, in Carroll,
Annotated Snark
, xxxviii–xxxix.

“Your obligation / is not discharged by”
Seamus Heaney,
Station Island
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1985), 92–93.

“Take hold of the shaft of”
Ibid., 97.

“At the present time, we understand”
Susskind,
The Black Hole War
, 440.

“Elementary phenomena are impossible without the”
John Archibald Wheeler,
At Home in the Universe
(Woodbury, NY: AIP Press, 1996), 292.

“The theory of measurement,” Wigner wrote
Eugene Wigner,
Symmetries and Reflections
(Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1967), 179.

“The interpretation of quantum mechanics … is”
Hugh Everett III, “The Theory of the Universal Wavefunction,” 1955, in
The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
, eds. Bryce DeWitt and R. Neill Graham (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973).

“does not introduce the idea of”
John Archibald Wheeler, “Assessment of Everett's ‘Relative State' Formulation of Quantum Theory,”
Reviews of Modern Physics
29, 3 (July 1957): 464.

“Mice and men and all on”
Wheeler,
At Home in the Universe
, 306.

“The theory of [quantum] measurement is”
Eugene Wigner,
Symmetries and Reflections
(Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1967), 179.

“The Aleph was probably two or”
Jorge Luis Borges,
Collected Fictions
(New York: Viking, 1998), 283–84.

“The difference between cosmology and the”
J. R. Minkel, “Strung Out on the Universe: Interview with Raphael Bousso,”
Scientific American
, April 7, 2003.

“This is just a particularly bad”
Raphael Bousso, “Cosmology and the S-Matrix,”
Physical Review D
71 (2005): 064024; arXiv:hep-th/0412197.

“ ‘building physics from scratch' ”
LuboÅ¡ Motl, “Why I Don't Quite Agree with Tom Banks on Eternal Inflation,”
The Reference Frame
, October 24, 2011,
http://motls.​blogspot.​com/​2011/​10/​why-i-dont-quite-agree-with-tom-banks.​html
.

“Complementarity,” the authors concluded, “isn't enough.”
Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf, Joseph Polchinski, and James Sully, “Black Holes: Complementarity or Firewalls?” arXiv:1207.31323[hep-th], July 13, 2012.

Susskind posted a paper on the arXiv
Leonard Susskind, “Complementarity and Firewalls,” arXiv:1208.3445[hep-th], August 16, 2012.

“Bousso and Harlow have [advocated] a”
Leonard Susskind, “Black Hole Complementarity and the Harlow-Hayden Conjecture,” arXiv:1301.4505v1[hep-th], January 18, 2013.