The Wheeler-Feynman Connection: Why Gravity Might Be a Conversation Between Past and Future

In 1941, two physicists walked into an American Physical Society meeting and proposed something that most of their colleagues found deeply uncomfortable: the future can influence the past.

Richard Feynman was twenty-two years old. John Archibald Wheeler was thirty. Together, they had constructed a theory of electrodynamics in which electromagnetic radiation is not carried by an independent field propagating through space, but is instead a direct interaction between charged particles — an interaction that travels both forward and backward in time. They called it the absorber theory.

The idea was elegant and radical. In standard electrodynamics, when an electron accelerates, it emits a retarded wave — a signal that propagates outward into the future. Wheeler and Feynman proposed that this is only half the story. Every absorbing particle in the universe also sends an advanced wave — a signal that propagates backward in time, arriving at the emitter at the exact moment of emission. The combination of these two waves produces the observed causal radiation we measure in the laboratory.

I want to be honest about something: when I first encountered the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory, I felt a shock of recognition. Not because I had read about it before developing the Ashebo Framework — I had not. But because the mathematical structure they described in 1945 for electromagnetic radiation is remarkably parallel to what I arrived at independently for gravity.

The Parallel Structure

Let me lay out the correspondence plainly.

In Wheeler-Feynman electrodynamics, every electromagnetic interaction involves two waves: a retarded wave propagating forward from the emitter, and an advanced wave propagating backward from the absorber. The observable radiation is the interference of these two. An isolated charge, with no absorber to "complete the handshake," does not radiate at all. The future must participate for the present to function.

In the Ashebo Framework, every particle is a standing wave in time, formed by the interference of two temporal fields: the Compression Field (φ_c), which propagates forward from the Origin, and the Symmetry Restoration Field (R), which propagates backward from the Final Symmetry State (Σ = 0). Gravity itself emerges as the net tension between these two opposing fields: g = φ_c − R. Without the backward field from the future, particles would not be stable, and gravity would not exist.

The structural analogy is striking:

Wheeler-Feynman has the retarded wave (forward from emitter) and the advanced wave (backward from absorber). The Ashebo Framework has the Compression Field (forward from Origin) and the Restoration Field (backward from Final State). In both cases, observable physics emerges from the interference of forward and backward propagating signals. In both cases, the future is not passive — it actively participates in determining the present.

Where They Diverge

But the analogy has limits, and the limits are where the Ashebo Framework begins to say something new.

Wheeler and Feynman's absorber theory is confined to electrodynamics. It describes how charged particles exchange electromagnetic radiation. It does not address gravity, it does not address particle stability, and it does not address cosmic evolution. When John Cramer extended the idea into quantum mechanics with his Transactional Interpretation in 1986, he preserved the "handshake" metaphor — an offer wave from the emitter meets a confirmation wave from the absorber — but still did not specify where the backward wave originates or what physical boundary condition generates it.

This is the gap that the Ashebo Framework fills.

In my framework, the backward wave is not an abstract mathematical solution that we invoke for symmetry. It has a physical source: the Final Symmetry State, Σ = 0. This is the unique attractor of the field dynamics — the state toward which the universe is evolving, where all asymmetries between compression and restoration are resolved. It is not a metaphysical postulate. It emerges naturally from the field equations as the only stable endpoint.

This distinction matters enormously. Wheeler and Feynman needed the "absorber condition" — the assumption that all radiation is eventually absorbed by the universe — to make their theory work. But they could not derive this condition from first principles. It was an assumption about the large-scale structure of the universe. In the Ashebo Framework, the equivalent condition — that the Restoration Field exists and propagates backward — follows directly from the existence of the Final Symmetry State. The boundary condition is not assumed; it is derived.

From Electrodynamics to Gravity

The deepest difference is in scope. Wheeler and Feynman showed that electromagnetic radiation requires both forward and backward waves. I am proposing that gravity itself — the most universal force in nature — has the same bidirectional structure.

Consider what this means. In standard physics, gravity is a one-way street: mass curves spacetime, and objects follow the curvature. There is no "backward" component. Einstein's field equations are local and causal in the conventional sense.

In the Ashebo Framework, gravity is the difference between two opposing field tensions. The Compression Field pushes matter together (this is the familiar attractive gravity). The Restoration Field pushes matter apart (this is the retrocausal component, driven by the future's pull toward symmetry). What we measure as gravitational acceleration is the net result:

g = φ_c − R

This immediately explains something that standard gravity cannot: why the Sun's surface gravity is only 28 times Earth's despite having 333,000 times the mass. In the Ashebo Framework, the Sun's intense fusion activity generates a strong Restoration Field that partially cancels the Compression Field. The Sun pulls less than expected because it is pushing back harder — converting asymmetric baryons into symmetric photons, accelerating the approach to Σ = 0.

Wheeler and Feynman would have appreciated this, I think. Their absorber theory showed that radiation is not a one-way emission but a two-way transaction. The Ashebo Framework extends this insight to gravity: gravitational attraction is not a one-way pull but a two-way tension between past and future.

The Intellectual Lineage

I want to be clear about the intellectual lineage here, because I believe in honesty about where ideas come from and where they go.

The idea that physics might be time-symmetric did not begin with Wheeler and Feynman. It traces back to Hugo Tetrode in 1922, who proposed that electromagnetic interactions are direct actions between particles along lightlike intervals. Karl Schwarzschild and Adriaan Fokker developed similar ideas. Wheeler and Feynman synthesized these into a coherent theory.

After them, Cramer's Transactional Interpretation (1986) brought the handshake metaphor into quantum mechanics. Yakir Aharonov's Two-State Vector Formalism showed that quantum systems can be described by both forward-evolving and backward-evolving state vectors. Huw Price has argued philosophically that time-symmetry in physics is more natural than the time-asymmetric assumptions we habitually make.

The Ashebo Framework stands on this lineage. But it extends it in three directions that none of these predecessors explored:

First, it applies the bidirectional structure to gravity, not just electrodynamics or quantum mechanics. Second, it specifies the physical source of the backward wave — the Final Symmetry State — rather than leaving it as an ungrounded mathematical solution. Third, it makes quantitative, falsifiable predictions at cosmological scales: variable gravitational coupling, composition-dependent gravity, velocity anisotropy in galaxy clusters. These predictions have been tested against data from over 10,000 galaxies, and the results are consistent with the framework.

An Invitation

I did not set out to build a retrocausal theory. I set out to understand why the gravitational constant G can be derived from baryon asymmetry and symmetry restoration rates — a result that seemed too clean to be coincidental. The retrocausal structure emerged because the mathematics demanded it. The Restoration Field had to propagate backward in time for the equations to close.

When I later discovered the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory, I realized that the same mathematical necessity had appeared before, in a different domain. Wheeler and Feynman found that electrodynamics requires both forward and backward waves. I found that gravity requires both forward and backward fields. The pattern is the same. The domain is different. The implications are larger.

If Wheeler and Feynman were right that electromagnetic radiation is a transaction between past and future, then perhaps it should not surprise us that gravity — the other long-range force — has the same structure. Perhaps the universe is, at every scale, a conversation between where it came from and where it is going.

I believe this conversation is worth having. The mathematics is there. The predictions are there. The data, so far, is consistent. What remains is for the community to examine, challenge, and extend these ideas — or to show where they fail. That is how physics works.

The future, after all, is already participating.