FUCK OFF SCRIBBD

the position to probe those issues than philosophers

are. But the only philosophers who have a prayer of making progress are
those that understand the physics. I steer clear of asking what is ultimate
reality.”
Fair enough, I thought, though it was hard to imagine that kind of
aversion to the big questions coming from a student of Wheeler’s. “Did
Wheeler influence your thinking on physics?” I asked.
“Wheeler had a tremendous ability to use physical intuition to guess
how things behave. The recognition that there’s enormous power in that
—that had the biggest influence on me. Wheeler made great discoveries
using intuition, though ultimately they had to be tested against the
mathematics. In my generation, the person who has been most effective
in the Wheeler approach is Stephen Hawking. Out of necessity he was
unable to do complex mathematics once he lost the use of his hands, so
he functions through enormous physical intuition, plus solving problems
geometrically and topologically in his head.”
“Do you have any good stories about Wheeler?” my father asked.
“I’ll tell you one,” Thorne offered. “Today there’s a lot of discussion in
string theory about the idea of the landscape of vacua. The particular
version of the laws of quantum fields we have in our universe might be
different in other universes.” Wheeler, ahead of his time as always, had
thought a lot about this issue, Thorne told us. Wheeler called it
“mutability,” the idea that the laws of physics don’t exist in some
Platonic realm outside the universe, but come into being with the
universe at its birth and eventually die with the universe at its death. “In
1971 Wheeler was visiting, and Wheeler, Feynman, and I went to lunch
at the Burger Continental restaurant here at Caltech. Wheeler was
talking about this idea of mutability and asking, ‘What determines which
laws are in our universe?’ Feynman turned to me and said, ‘This guy
sounds crazy. But he has always sounded crazy.’ ”
We all laughed. “What are you working on these days?” I asked.
“I’m exploring ways to be creative in other areas,” Thorne said. “I’m
working on two science fiction movies in Hollywood and writing an
article for Playboy.”
My father chuckled loudly and then, realizing that maybe he
shouldn’t, cleared his throat, furrowed his brow, and tried to be serious.
“What inspired you to make that change?”
“Based on my genetic heritage, I’ll probably live into my hundreds,”
Thorne said. “But I can’t continue doing really great theoretical physics
for a long time. I decided that this was the appropriate time to move into
directions that I can continue with for a few decades. Also, I’m bored.”
“Well, that was kind of a bummer,” I said, as we walked back toward
our hotel.
We had been hoping to get some answers, but all we’d gotten were a
few verbal shrugs. Thorne didn’t see any profound meaning in the
boundary of a boundary; he pretty much said that the idea was useless.
Maybe it was. No matter how intriguing it sounded, there was no
guarantee that the phrase held any shining truth. Maybe it was nothing
more than the desperate, incoherent cry of an aging physicist who knew
he was running out of time, or an aging man who didn’t know he was
running out of wits. Then again, as Feynman had said, Wheeler had
always sounded crazy. And more often than not, he had been right.
“At least he told us about Zurek,” my dad said. “That’s useful.”
That was true. Thorne had said that Wojciech Zurek, a physicist at Los
Alamos, was the world’s best living expert on Wheeler’s self-excited
circuit.
I nodded. “I guess we’re going to New Mexico.”
***
We checked in to a Pueblo-style bed-and-breakfast surrounded by white
adobe walls and hanging ristras of fire-red chile peppers, then spent the
day visiting art galleries on Canyon Road and discussing the nature of
reality.
The next morning, we drove forty-five minutes to Los Alamos, winding
our way up the mountainside to the Pajarito Plateau, seven thousand
feet above sea level, to the “town that never was.” Seven decades earlier
the government had overtaken the mesa and set up Los Alamos National
Laboratory as the top-secret headquarters for the Manhattan Project.
Physicists from around the country had left their respective universities
and come here to build the atomic bomb in the hopes of putting an end