Beyond John Wheeler’s knack for finding and mentoring the world’s most gifted young scientists (besides Hugh Everett, Wheeler’s students included Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne, and, as we will shortly see, Jacob Bekenstein), he had an uncanny ability to identify issues whose exploration could change our fundamental paradigm of nature’s workings. During a lunch we had at Princeton in 1998, I asked him what he thought the dominant theme in physics would be in the decades going forward. As he had already done frequently that day, he put his head down, as if his aging frame had grown weary of
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