It from Bit: John Wheeler’s Radical Vision of Reality as Information Imagine if the universe wasn’t built from atoms or energy, but from questions. Yes-or-no queries, flickering like binary code in the cosmic void. That’s the mind-bending core of physicist John Archibald Wheeler’s “It from Bit” hypothesis, proposed in 1989. Wheeler, the legendary mentor to Feynman and Thorne, didn’t just tinker with black holes and quantum gravity he dared to flip physics on its head: What if everything physical (“it”) emerges from pure information (“bit”)? Let’s unpack this scientifically, but with a dash of wonder. In quantum mechanics, reality isn’t fixed until observed think of Schrödinger’s cat, alive and dead until you peek. Wheeler took this further with his “delayed-choice” experiments (inspired by Bohr’s complementarity). In one setup, light from a distant quasar bends around a galaxy, acting as waves or particles depending on how we measure it billions of years later. The past isn’t set; it’s retroactively shaped by our informational choices. Wheeler argued: “Every it every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely… from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits.” This isn’t sci-fi; it’s grounded in information theory and thermodynamics. Black holes, which Wheeler named, evaporate via Hawking radiation, linking entropy (disorder) to information loss. If information is conserved (as quantum laws demand), then perhaps the universe’s “stuff” is just encoded data, processed by participatory observers like us. Why does this matter today? In an era of quantum computing and AI, “It from Bit” echoes in digital physics simulations (e.g., Wolfram’s cellular automata) and holography (AdS/CFT correspondence), where our 3D world might be a projection from 2D info on a cosmic boundary. Could the Big Bang be a colossal bit-flip? Are we bits in a grand simulation? Wheeler’s idea challenges materialism: Reality isn’t “out there” it’s co-created. As he quipped, “We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago.” Mind blown? Dive into his book At Home in the Universe for more: What do you think information first, or matter?