Two Handshakes Across Time
From Wheeler–Feynman to the Gnergy Principle of Organization (Updated by adding the Hilbert space
Two Handshakes Across Time:)
1. Why Radiation Needs a Handshake
When a lamp emits light, we usually think it just sprays photons into space. But John Wheeler and Richard Feynman proposed something far subtler: radiation only becomes real if there is a handshake between emitter and absorber [1, 2].
In their absorber theory, an emitter doesn’t just send light forward in time. It sends both forward-moving and backward-moving waves. A future absorber (like your eye, or a wall) responds with its own backward-in-time waves. Where these meet, the “contract” is sealed, and energy is transferred as a photon.
From this perspective, light emission isn’t a one-way throw but a two-way negotiation across time.
2. Virtual vs. Actual Handshakes
We can now distinguish two layers of handshake:
Wheeler–Feynman handshake (Hilbert space, virtual):
Lives in the abstract Hilbert space of quantum mechanics.
Reversible, time-symmetric, and non-dissipative.
Represents potential interactions — the negotiation stage.
Gnergy handshake (spacetime, actual):
Governed by the Gnergy Principle of Organization (GPO) [3].
Irreversible, energy- and information-dissipating.
Marks the transition from potentiality (virtual) to actuality (realized).
3. Reconciling Physics and Biology
Physics shows us that the laws are time-symmetric—they work the same way forward or backward. Biology, however, is built on irreversibility: metabolism, growth, evolution, consciousness.
By pairing the Wheeler–Feynman handshake with the GPO handshake, we see both stages:
Virtual substrate (Hilbert space): reversible, time-symmetric negotiations.
Actual emergence (spacetime): irreversible, energy+information handshakes that drive organization.
This dual-handshake model bridges the gap between physics’ symmetry and biology’s arrow of time, and it echoes Aristotle’s potential-to-actual transition, Peirce’s Firstness-to-Thirdness, and modern quantum ideas of wavefunction collapse.
4. An Everyday Analogy
Drafting an email and saving it without sending is like the Wheeler–Feynman handshake: it exists in potential form, reversible and hidden in Hilbert space.
Clicking “send,” consuming energy, and transmitting across servers is like the GPO handshake: irreversible, actualized in spacetime.
5. Conclusion
What Wheeler and Feynman glimpsed as a reversible negotiation in the virtual Hilbert space is completed by the Gnergy Principle [3]: only when energy and information are spent in spacetime does a handshake become real.
Reality is thus built from two stages of handshakes—
virtual in Hilbert space,
actual in spacetime.
Together, they may explain how the mathematical symmetry of physics gives rise to the irreversible arrow of biology.
References:
[1] Zurek, W. H. (1982). Environment-induced superselection rules. Physical Review D, 26(8), 1862–1880. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.26.1862
[2] Zurek, W. H. (1991). Decoherence and the transition from quantum to classical. Physics Today, 44(10), 36–44. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.881293
[3] Ji, S. (2018). The Gnergy Principle of Organization. In: The Cell Language Theory: Connecting Mind and Matter. World Scientific Publishing, New Jersey. Pp. 33-34.