physics principle of nonlocality. — if “everything in the universe is aware of everything else.”

In a 2009 interview with the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, conducted in the garden of his Toronto home, he pointed to a wasp buzzing near a rose, which he said reminded him of the physics principle of nonlocality — the direct influence of one object on another distant object — which was the subject of a talk he had recently heard by the physicist Nicolas Gisin.

Professor Hacking wondered aloud, the interviewer noted, if the whole universe was governed by nonlocality — if “everything in the universe is aware of everything else.”

“That’s what you should be writing about,” he said. “Not me. I’m a dilettante. My governing word is ‘curiosity.’”