John Archibald Wheeler, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, died of pneumonia at the age of 96. He coined the term “black holes,” worked with Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, and mentored talents such as Richard Feynman and Hugh Everett. In the 1990s, he advanced the hypothesis that information is more fundamental than matter, a concept summarized in his statement “it from bits,” the idea that everything (it) is made only of information (bits). Some of his maxims: “We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance.” “Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.” “The universe gives birth to consciousness, and consciousness gives meaning to the universe.”
