Hr replied all you needed was protons, neutrons and electrons. Regardless of the fine structure and behavior of those particles, all chemical reactions and molecular structures could be explained using just three. You don’t need quarks or mesons to do chemistry (although they no doubt play a vital role in the structure of matter. Subatomic particles were essential to predict what goes on in nuclear chemistry (radio chemistry), but you can do anything you want with protein synthesis, nucleic acid, cell metabolism, RNA, you name it, without anything else but protons, neutrons and electrons. You don’t even need antiparticles. In other words, you can describe and explain the phenomenally complex processes and structures of the cell without needing to go any deeper than p+, n, and e-. In fact, all you really need is the periodic table. You don’t need to know the component parts of atoms to understand chemical compounds. You don’t even need to know what an isotope is.

The only exception is that the shapes and sizes of electron shells determine the architecture and configurations of molecules, and whether certain reactions can occur, or how fast they will proceed; but you don’t need to know the shape and bond angles of H2O to understand how things dissolve in it and precipitate out of it. That can be measured directly, you know the how, you don’t need the why.

Likewise, you can do genetics and evolutionary biology without knowing any chemistry at all. When Darwin and Mendel worked, we hadn’t even established the existence of atoms! And you can study ecology, or predator-prey relationships, or reproductive biology, animal behavior or population dynamics with no knowledge of evolution or natural selection. Simpler structures and processes assemble into more complex ones, which can be studied and understood with no knowledge of the levels of complexity that lie beneath. Humans are animals, and we study psychology with only a very poor knowledge of the biology (or chemistry, or particle physics) that operates our brains. And humans can assemble into social groups studied by sociologists, which can further assemble into larger cultures studied by anthropologists, and even larger and more durable ones studied by historians. At different scales the universe looks different, and different laws seem to emerge from what lies below.

A few simple rules (they can be written down in only a few hundred words) completely determine how chess is played, but there’s a lot more to the game than just knowing how the pieces move.

I am not qualified to weigh in on the validity of this interpretation, but Wheeler was far more qualified than most.

He also was a genuinely nice guy…

Responses to the same external stimulus can appear very differently to a generic observer. A gas will expand when heated; a liquid boil, a solid emit thermal IR. A plant will dry out, possibly die, an animal may just try to get out of there. A human might try to turn up the A/C or call for help. The Republican Party refuses to believe it at all. All are collections of matter responding to the same environmental change in different ways, depending on their capabilities and their “level” (or “type”) of consciousness.

The multiple slit diffraction apparatus used in wave/particle duality experiments are deliberately designed to be as simple as possible, only binary responses are expected or allowed. In the real world, a spectrum of possibilities exist.

Yes, I agree that our investigations of quantum reality reveal behavior which is totally unthinkable in our ordinary world of “common
sense”. But we just happen to be on the order of a meter in size and experience the world at about a second at a time. We are looking at only a very tiny piece of the universe, and have only evolved perception and behavior appropriate to that little piece.

https://landing.newscientist.com/department-for-education-feature-3/

Its almost as if someone has to be in the forest in order for the falling tree to make a sound. Although in this case, the tree (or forest) has to somehow make the woodsman/listener appear for there to be an audience. Of course, the “observer” need not be a sentient being, it can be a photographic plate or CCD chip or a microphone or just any particle of matter that can be affected by the original event. An event’s legitimacy or reality is determined by how it is perceived by other matter, how it registers on other events. Somehow, just looking at the million year-old photons from a distant galaxy that enter my telescope somehow reaches out and gives that galaxy a measurable reality. My observing that galaxy somehow reaches back in time and space and alters it, or makes it possible. It isn’t time that keeps everything from happening at once, its the speed of light. Its almost as if the universe has to reach forward through time to create its observers in order to make its own existence possible.

But its not that simple, is it? There’s a symmetry in these thoughts that may be more of our own making than any property of the universe. This is only a metaphor we are discussing here, and it would be misleading to think we have an explanation. It is equivalent to saying that the universe time travels in order to make the observers manifest that give its phenomena reality as it is to say that the universe is conscious and it is perception that makes things real. It all sounds like navel gazing sophistry until we recall that in the quantum world the relationship between observer and observed is very real, we build machines and navigate spacecraft based on these principles. In the macrosopic universe, the relative positions of observer and observed in space-time DO alter the observations, space and time alter measures of distance, time and mass, and when you come down to it, the observation is the only thing we can know for sure. You can’t build a physics on what we think the universe should be doing, we can only rely on what we see it doing. There’s more than one way to skin Schrodinger’s cat.

Our metaphors may be only a vague approximation, but they are not mere navel gazing sophistry. Even engineers sometimes have to take them into account.

Long before you start making systematic observations and organizing them into testable hypotheses you first have to make the leap of faith that that program is worthwhile in the first place. If the Universe is the product of capricious gods who can continuously change the rules on us just to fuck with our minds, then there is no point in doing anything at all. We just have to kiss their ass and hope for the best.

2500 years ago the Pre-Socratic philosophers of Ionia came up with the idea of Nature, an external reality that existed independently of us and that was amenable to investigation and reason. There was a universe out there independent of our consciousness, and that it operated on rules which could be determined. It might be ultimately unknowable due to our own limitations or it might be capable of multiple and equally valid interpretations, but even the gods, if they existed at all, had to play the game by the same rules we did. They were the first to come up with this idea, and to this day, not everyone has fully accepted it. We still don’t know for sure they were right, but at least, that program does seem to be yielding practical results, so it seems worthwhile sticking with it for the time being.

There is a story, probably apocryphal, that Einstein was once asked why he had spent so much time and effort in the later years of his life trying to come up with a Unified Field Theory that would unite the fundamental forces and reconcile Relativity and the Quantum. There was, after all, no guarantee that he would find it, or even that the search for it wasn’t just an infinite maze of blind alleys and a waste of time. His reply was that he had already made his fortune and secured his place in history, and he could afford to throw himself into an enterprise that might never lead anywhere. This would allow younger, and perhaps brighter, young physicists the opportunity to tackle questions that had a better hope of a solution, so they could build their careers doing truly useful and interesting work.

What a perfect combination of the completely speculative and theoretical, and the fiercely practical.

He wrote a musing on the topic in a short little book called ‘Beyond the Black Hole’. It is more philosophy than physics… I have a copy he gave my father, you can find a pdf here:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://jawarchive.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/beyond-the-black-hole.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjKiZq_kInbAhWtnuAKHXVMCcIQFjAAegQICRAB&usg=AOvVaw2wCJTPqgMmUx7x6MHMABwS

You might want to skip down to pg 362 to whet your appetite, and then read through.

As a young child I was lucky enough to sit in on a couple of conversations he had with my dad on the question of what qualifies as an observer, and the observer’s place in the universe…

It was a fascinating topic for me… and perhaps someday science can answer those questions, but for now it is still relegated to the realm of philosophy.