Wheeler the storyteller: on the uses and drawbacks of history for life

When a physicist evokes the past, historians typically start rubbing their hands, waiting for their chance to correct the naive scientist who seems to intrude into their job. In this attitude too, however, there is a form of naiveté that can prevent us from appreciating and properly weighing many aspects of history. The manifold uses of the past by the physicists themselves, in particular, remain a neglected topic. This paper intends to show how an eminent figure such as John A. Wheeler (1911–2008), also thanks to his long life and career, created a highly peculiar—and, communication-wise, very effective—mixture of personal experience and reminiscences, historical pathos and anecdotes, guiding ideas and metaphors. The relevance of such amalgam is not limited to the employment of rhetoric in science, since it shaped Wheeler’s influential research programs and suggestions throughout decades, besides offering a powerfully evocative and captivating communicative model for the speculative frontiers of physics. While all this is meant as a study in the way Wheeler made use of the past within his activities as a physicist, it can also provide us with a critical lesson about today’s construction of pseudo-historical narratives that try to legitimize bold proposals in lack of empirical results.