Everything Is Happening All the Time: Legendary Physicist John Archibald Wheeler on Death and the Life-Force

“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,” Walt Whitman writes in the prime of life.

“What happens when you get to the end of things?” four-year-old Johnny in Ohio asks his mother from the bathtub while Whitman’s borrowed atoms are becoming young grass in a New Jersey cemetery.

In his lifetime of nearly a century, John Archibald Wheeler (July 9, 1911–April 13, 2008) would go on revolutionize physics by posing this question to reality itself, emerging as a bridge figure betw...