Abstract
According to the bible, in the beginning was the word. Wheeler’s more modern doctrine “it from bit” is also not directly falsifiable, yet it reflects Einstein’s credo: The laws of physics are invariant in time. Past, present and future are therefore mere illusions. Shannon’s view was quite different: “We know the past but cannot control it. We control the future but cannot know it.” A critical review of weak and strong points in Wheeler’s and Shannon’s concepts makes Wheeler’s preposterous idea of a participatory universe understandable – either as an appealing implication of the credo that is still predominant in physics or as one more speculation suspecting observation from outside universe. Wheeler’s wormholes were mysterious as long as point-particles were assumed. Wheeler intended to show backward causation with his delayed choice thought experiment. His reduction of reality to yes-no questions implies a description of reality in terms of rational numbers while his singularity of a black hole requires real numbers, not just rational ones. Anyway, Wheeler gave rise to scrutinize basic tenets. Ritz was presumably wrong with his emission theory but Shannon nonetheless shared his view concerning causality. While Shannon quantified information on a probabilistic basis similar to Boltzmann’s entropy, he did not consider the past an expectation. He did not even mention a quantum state that could be present between past and future.
Eckard Blumschein