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How are we going to answer? Should we say: "Yes, oh, the universe, if there is no you, I would not be born. Yet you, and a great system, made of the phenomenon of each is a phenomenon depends on behavioral observations, you can always there, and even the registration of non-primary, such as mine? "           The Universe and Observer-Participancy     An old legend describes a dialog between Abraham and Jehovah. Jehovah chides Abraham, "You would not even exist if it were not for me!" "Yes, Lord, that I know," Abraham replies, "but also You would not be known if it were not for me."   In our time the participants in the dialog have changed. They are the universe and man. The universe, in the words of some who would aspire to speak for it, says, "I am a giant machine. I supply the space and time for your existence. There was no before before I came into being, and there will be no after after I cease to exist. You are an unimportant bit of matter located in an unimportant galaxy."   How shall we reply? Shall we say, "Yes, oh universe, without you I would not have been able to come into being. Yet you, great system, are made of phenomena; and every phenomenon rests on an act of observation. You could never even exist without elementary acts of registration such as mine"?   Are elementary quantum phenomena, those untouchable, indivisible acts of creation, indeed the building material of all that is? Beyond particles, beyond fields of force, beyond geometry, beyond space and time themselves, is the ultimate constituent, the still more ethereal act of observer-participancy? For Dr. Samuel Johnson the stone was real enough when he kicked it. The subsequent discovery that the matter in that rock is made of positive and negative electric charges and more than 99.99 per cent empty space does not diminish the pain that it inflicts on one's toe. If the stone is someday revealed to be altogether emptiness, "reality" will be none the worse for the finding.   Roland M.Frye, in reminding us of Shakespeare and of ways of seeing, gives us opportunity to recall those words of almost four hundred years ago,   And as imagination bodies forth / The form of things unknown, the poet's pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.   Are billions upon billions of acts of observer-participancy the foundation of everything? We are about as far as we can be today from knowing enough about the deeper machinery of the universe to answer this question. Increasing knowledge about detail has brought an increasing ignorance about plan.       — John A. Wheeler, Law without Law, Chapter 13, Unit 1, in Quantum Theory and Measurement, ed. John A. Wheeler, Wojciech H Zurek               Indexes/09