1911 – 2008 · A portrait
A Princeton physicist who helped revive general relativity and named the black hole later proposed that physical reality itself is built from yes-or-no bits of information.
The line above is how his claims were received — by the scientists whose job was to doubt them. It rises as a claim is tested and accepted, and the room brightens with it. It is not a verdict on truth: some accepted ideas are later overturned, and some rejected ones come back. A hollow point is a claim still open.
After World War II he helped rekindle American physicists' interest in general relativity, which had been a backwater field, and trained a generation of students at Princeton, including Richard Feynman and Kip Thorne.
During a December 1967 lecture he adopted the term ‘black hole’ for a gravitationally collapsed star, after an audience member suggested it at an earlier talk. The name entered standard physics vocabulary within a few years.
In a 1989 conference talk, published as ‘Information, Physics, Quantum,’ he proposed that every physical thing derives its existence from answers to yes-or-no questions — ‘it from bit’ — calling this a participatory universe. Most physicists treated it as speculative.
Physicist Rolf Landauer countered in Physics Today that information can never float free of matter: a bit always needs some physical thing to carry it, so information must obey physical law rather than stand prior to it.
The idea remains a minority position, discussed and extended by later physicists, but without an experiment able to confirm or rule it out. Most working physicists treat it as a stimulating idea rather than settled theory.