Speaker
Description
In the previous two congresses we have respectively detailed (1) the genesis of John Wheeler's idea of a partecipatory universe and the role of a "super-Copernican" community scattered across spacetime and (2) how all that was linked to Wheeler's changing views on the nature of the observer in quantum physics and to his slogan "it from bit". We have thus shown how these topics, intertwined with others (such as the famous delayed-choice experiments and Wheeler's reflections on Bohr's complementarity), were merged and then conceived anew in the context of an original and certainly thought-provoking cosmological scenario. As fascinating as this intellectual trajectory may be, however, one may wonder if, in the end, it was just the phantasmagoria of an eminent but also idiosyncratic physicist. In this third instalment, we intend to underscore and properly contextualize the neglected impact that Wheeler's cosmological views have had on more recent perspectives, such as the work of Thomas Hertog and Stephen Hawking or quantum gravity-related attempts. In this way, we will better realize how Wheeler's ideas, although often misunderstood or extrapolated from their original framework, have proven, once again, to be particularly fruitful.
