The noted physicist John Wheeler published a paper in 1979 entitled “Beyond the Black Hole,” in which he delved into the “sibylline strangeness of the landscape.”  By landscape, he meant the fundamental fabric of reality, particularly at the quantum, or subatomic, level.  There the laws of classic physics do not apply; hence, “sibylline strangeness,” a reference to the Sibyls, or oracles, of ancient Greece, who were noted for their cryptic prophecies.  Instead of the mathematical precision of phenomena in the visible world, you get probabilities, something that caused Albert Einstein to complain, “God does not play dice.”  It turns out he does.

Black holes — a phrase coined by Wheeler — are themselves strange.  They are collapsed stars that were so gravitationally dense that not even light can escape.  But Einstein predicted them, and their existence has since been confirmed.  The subatomic realm is something else altogether.  Causes do not produce pre-determined effects, only possibilities  An object cannot have a fixed position and velocity, at least not at the same time; and electrons can simultaneously spin clockwise and counterclockwise.· "No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this," Einstein complained in a paper he wrote in 1935 with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen.· Even Nils Bohr, one of quantum theory's founders, observed that "anyone who is not shocked by quantum mechanics has not fully understood it.”

Perhaps nothing in quantum mechanics is stranger than the phenomenon known as “wave function collapse.”  Einstein had been the first to report that light (photons) behaved like both particles and like waves.  So which was it?  Succeeding generations of theorists pursued the question, concluding that elementary particles remain in an indeterminate state with regard to such measurable qualities as mass, location and velocity until there is an act of observation.  This triggers a wave function collapse that causes photons and other elementary particles to take on measurable qualities — a phenomenon that physicists refer to as the “observer effect.” 

If an act of observation in required to cause elementary particles to take on measurable qualities, who is doing the observing?  In his paper, “Beyond the Black Hole,” Wheeler suggests the observer ultimately may be the universe itself, which he characterizes as a “self-excited circuit.”  To illustrate his point, his paper includes the simple diagram of an uppercase “U” representing the universe, with a large eyeball atop one of its branches gazing across the curve of the “U” at the other branch.  “No phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon,” Wheeler wrote, by which he meant not just the bizarre antics of elementary particles, but the entire universe.

If we’re just a small patch of the universe observing itself, why do we think of the universe as existing wholly outside of ourselves?  The philosopher Owen Barfield, a contemporary of Wheeler who understood the metaphysical implications of quantum mechanics, proposed an answer.  He theorized that ours is a “camera civilization” in which we all believe our brains are shut away in a camera-like box looking out upon the world, with “me” on the inside and everything else on the outside.  We are deluded into thinking “the mind of man is a passive onlooker at the processes and phenomena of nature, in the creation of which it neither takes nor has taken any part.”     

As a landscape photographer, I have some familiarity with the workings of a camera.  When you look through the viewfinder, it’s easy to objectify what you see through the lens.  The world exists “out there,” and you’re in here looking not at the world itself but at an image of the world captured on your camera.  In effect, there is not one world but two – or three, if you count the image in your mind’s eye.  Yet quantum physicists would say there is no real boundary between what we normally think of as the exterior world and the interior world of thoughts and perceptions. “The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived,” wrote quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger.  “Subject and object are only one.”   

Wheeler believed the same game of peekaboo between subject and object that plays out in the quantum realm may also operate in the macroscopic world as well. He theorized that we live in a “participatory universe” in which consciousness is not a bystander to physical reality but is an essential element in its formation. In a sense, you could say the universe comes into being because we are here to witness it.  It is as if every time I snap the shutter of my camera, the universe is taking a selfie. 

Wheeler’s willingness to engage in metaphysical speculation about quantum theory has not always been shared by his colleagues. Physicist Stephen Hawking spoke for many when he said, “Mysticism is for people who can’t do the math.”  Wheeler, who did pioneering work in nuclear fission and introduced the concepts of wormholes in space and cosmic foam, certainly knew how to do the math.  Raised as a Unitarian, Wheeler’s views were never explicitly religious, unlike Schrödinger, a student of Advaita Vedanta, an ancient Hindu philosophy based on the premise that all experience is unitary.  However, both appeared to be mining the same vein. 

Wheeler’s paper was refreshingly free of impenetrable math and abstruse theorizing.  There were some diagrams, but the uppercase “U” topped by an eye conveyed a meaning that even a child could understand. Still, it wasn’t clear how a material universe, made up of insentient cosmic stuff, could perceive anything — unless, of course, an uppercase Universe was really a stand-in for an uppercase g-o-d who perceives everything.   

When I look through the viewfinder of my camera, I often find that my thinking mind has taken a back seat to my visual cortex. The world is mysteriously stripped of names.  It is now all shapes, patterns, colors, texture, the play of light and shadow on a wall, all within the camera’s viewfinder — my little patch of the universe.  With a camera in my hands, I am mostly operating on instinct, or whatever you call it when the visual cortex has taken charge.  I never think, “This will make a great picture” – at least not in so many words.  Not in any words at all, actually.  Who was it that said words are slayers of the real?  As the philosopher Wittgenstein kept telling his colleagues, “Don’t think, look.” 

I am reminded of one of the more gnomic utterances of the 14th-century German mystic, Meister Eckhart, who said, "My eye and God's eye are one eye…”  Not that I think God is looking through the viewfinder of my camera when I am lining up a shot.  In that moment, I don’t know who is lining up the shot.  There is nothing but seeing going on.  One might even diagram Eckhart’s utterance with an uppercase “U” adorned with a big eyeball on top.  As for whose eyeball it is, who can say?