John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008) was a consummate American scientist. Trained at Johns Hopkins, Wheeler was a nuclear physicist who contributed to the American atomic bomb and the post-war hydrogen bomb projects. He spent his career at Princeton, where, after the war, he transitioned to studying the physics of Einstein’s theory of gravity—General Relativity.

This paper explicates Wheeler’s metaphysics as it shifted during his years as a “relativist” using published and unpublished sources. I argue that Wheeler’s thought was characterized by a philosophical drive toward the underlying roots and causes of things, characteristic of the philosophical tradition of Anglophone analysis. Wheeler’s thought was also characterized by a delight in paradox, and a desire to progress through paradoxical formulations such as “mass without mass” and “charge without charge.”

In 1953 Wheeler first proposed to consider the “view that only fields of zero rest mass should be regarded as fundamental”: the electromagnetic field, the gravitational field, and the neutrino field. In 1955 Wheeler and his student Charles Misner discovered that in fact they could capture a complete picture of classical physics with only one zero rest mass field; the gravitational field. Here he was moving toward a view that the vacuum is fundamental, which he would express by 1956. This was the beginning of his thoughts that empty space may not be simply the arena for physics, but may actually constitute matter. Perhaps everything was really nothing.