{"id":132338,"date":"2021-12-13T14:23:11","date_gmt":"2021-12-13T22:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/12\/is-there-a-thing-or-a-relationship-between-things-at-the-bottom-of-things"},"modified":"2021-12-13T14:23:11","modified_gmt":"2021-12-13T22:23:11","slug":"is-there-a-thing-or-a-relationship-between-things-at-the-bottom-of-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/12\/is-there-a-thing-or-a-relationship-between-things-at-the-bottom-of-things","title":{"rendered":"Is There a Thing, or a Relationship between Things, at the Bottom of Things?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/is-there-a-thing-or-a-relationship-between-things-at-the-bottom-of-things2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The wildly inventive <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.scientificamerican.com\/cross-check\/do-our-questions-create-the-world\/\">physicist John Wheeler<\/a> was an early explorer of this notion. In a 1989 paper, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/philpapers.org\/archive\/WHEIPQ.pdf\">Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links<\/a>,\u201d Wheeler takes a stab at \u201cthe age-old question: How come existence?\u201d The answer, he speculates, might come from a fusion of <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.scientificamerican.com\/cross-check\/why-information-cant-be-the-basis-of-reality\/\">physics and information theory<\/a>. The former traffics in \u201cits,\u201d or physical things, and the latter in \u201cbits,\u201d defined as answers to yes-or-no questions.<\/p>\n<p>Wheeler proposes that \u201cevery physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications, a conclusion which we epitomize in the phrase, <em>it from bit<\/em>.\u201d Noting the crucial role of measurement in the outcome of quantum experiments, Wheeler suggests that we live in a \u201cparticipatory universe,\u201d in which we bring the world into existence, and vice versa.<\/p>\n<p>Picking up on Wheeler\u2019s ideas, <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.scientificamerican.com\/cross-check\/the-philosophy-of-guessing-has-harmed-physics-expert-says\/\">physicist Carlo Rovelli<\/a> argues in a 1996 paper, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/quant-ph\/9609002.pdf\">Relational Quantum Mechanics<\/a>,\u201d that quantum mechanics undermines \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/im-agonizing-over-my-naive-realism\/\">naive realism<\/a>,\u201d the notion that science discovers a reality that exists independently of our observation of it. He proposes what he calls a \u201crelational\u201d interpretation of quantum mechanics, which says things only exist in relation to other things. Rovelli notes that Galileo and Kant, among others, anticipated the relational perspective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The wildly inventive physicist John Wheeler was an early explorer of this notion. In a 1989 paper, \u201cInformation, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links,\u201d Wheeler takes a stab at \u201cthe age-old question: How come existence?\u201d The answer, he speculates, might come from a fusion of physics and information theory. The former traffics in \u201cits,\u201d or [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132338\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}