The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family

by Peter Byrne

  Everett was not only a prankster and a software guru, he was also a master game theorist whose work epitomized the ethos of “rationality” worshipped by the Cold War technocracy. His specialty was designing and running computer simulations of nuclear wars, testing America’s ability to launch the real thing. One high-ranking general considered him to be “worth his weight in Plutonium 239.”3 And, outside the top secret world of intelligence and operations research, at which he excelled, his revolutionary work in theoretical physics, known as the “many worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics, was just beginning to be recognized as “one of the most daring and most ambitious theories ever constructed in the history of science.”4

  To his neighbors in suburban McLean, Virginia, the dad wearing the black suits studded with cigarette burns was just another government worker. Little did they know that his day job was planning the end of history. Nor did they know that many physicists and philosophers were subscribing to his theory that all physically probable events—from summer snow to nuclear winter—actually happen inside a multiplicity of branching universes that contain countless copies of everything and everybody in every possible configuration.

  Many worlds

  In his 1957 PhD thesis at Princeton University, Everett formulated a solution to a vexing problem in quantum theory, the measurement problem. Simply put, the problem arises because, logically, an atomic particle can move through space and time in a multiplicity of directions at once—as if it is an expanding, spherical wave simultaneously passing through all possible trajectories. But when we interact with the particle—when we measure it—we always find it at one place, not many. This fact does not accord with the fundamental rule of quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation.

  Everett showed that it is mathematically consistent to say that when a scientist measures the position of an atomic particle, he splits into numerous copies of himself. Each copy resides in a different universe. And each copy sees the particle in a different position. The set of all copies covers the set of all possible particle positions inside a multiverse. According to Everett, each universe inside the multiverse is constantly branching, like a tree, into separate but parallel worlds that cannot communicate with each other. Each parallel universe records a self-consistent history drawn from a range of physically possible histories. No one of these universes is any more or less real than another. Importantly, this does not mean that anything is possible: physical reality exercises certain constraints on what is probable.

  According to physicist, Bryce DeWitt, Everett showed that

  This universe is constantly splitting into a stupendous number of branches, all resulting from the measurement like interactions between its myriad of components. Moreover, every quantum transition taking place on every star, in every galaxy, in every remote corner of the universe is splitting our local world on earth into myriads of copies of itself…. Here is schizophrenia with a vengeance.5

  A consequence of the “many worlds” logic is that there are universes in which dinosaurs survived and humans remained shrew-like; universes in which you win the state lottery every week; universes in which Wall Street does not exist and global resources are equally shared. Sure, it seems like an improbable idea, but the many worlds theory is widely recognized as a major contender for interpreting how quantum theory links to physical reality. Today, quantum cosmologists use Everett’s “universal wave function” to view the cosmos from inside the cosmos, as opposed to trying to view it from outside, which is obviously impossible. And some scientists claim that recent discoveries made by satellites mapping the microwave residue of the Big Bang might be evidence validating Everett’s theory!6

  In fact, so seriously is this extremely counter-intuitive idea taken that there is a school of philosophy based at University of Oxford known as “Everettian.” And if you look in the index of just about any book on the foundations of quantum mechanics, you will see the entry, “Everett, Hugh III.” In July 2007, the prestigious scientific journal, Nature, featured his theory on its cover, celebrating the half-centenary of its publication.

  Whether you believe in it or not, understanding the argument of Everett’s many worlds model is of central importance to any attempt to rationalize the mysteries of the quantum world.

  Sadly, homage to the revolutionary theory came largely after the untimely death of the theorist in 1982. Originally fascinated by quantum mechanics, Everett had left physics behind after his published thesis was dismissed by most of the physics establishment. Two decades later, his appreciation of its burgeoning popularity was over-shadowed by the collapse of his personal world. Despite enjoying a challenging career in military operations research, and having enough money to indulge himself with rich foods, fine wines, sexual escapades, and Caribbean cruises, the joke-loving mathematician was inwardly fey.

  At the time of the drunken incident on the airplane, Everett’s consulting business was starting to disintegrate due to cut-backs in military research budgets and his mis-management of the business end. His marriage had long been troubled, and his self-effacing wife, Nancy, was resigned to accepting his affairs with employees and prostitutes (while engaging in a few affairs of her own). Within a decade, the scientist was ruined financially and personally—his body wracked by compulsive smoking, drinking, and eating. Only Nancy knew of the black depression that fuelled his self-destruction, and she felt powerless to intervene. Gradually, the demons of addiction and despair overcame him, sucking the pleasure out of both work and play.

  Ironically, Everett had devoted his life to making models of reality, but he was largely oblivious to the harm he caused those closest to him. He barely acknowledged the existence of the pair of troubled children, Mark and Liz, who yearned for parental attention and acted out their frustration when it was not forthcoming. When Everett died suddenly of a heart attack, his teenage son, Mark, trying to revive his corpse, reflected that he could not recall ever having touched his father in life.

  Archeology

  After his father died, Mark moved to Los Angeles and became a successful songwriter known to his fans as “E.” Years later, he learned that the man he had considered to be a “robot” capable only of sitting at the dining room table drinking martinis and smoking Kent cigarettes and scribbling line after line of computer code (it looked like “gibberish” to him) was a world-renowned quantum theorist.

  On a scorching hot day in June 2007, Mark and I descended into the sepulcher-cool basement of his house in Los Angeles. We were followed by a camera crew from the British Broadcasting Corporation, which was shooting a documentary about Mark’s journey to discover his father, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives. Much of the sloping, dirt-floored basement was filled with guitars and amplifiers and bicycles and bags of cast-off clothing and broken chairs. One wall was lined with wooden shelves holding the family saga—two dozen cardboard boxes bursting with memorabilia and paper trails left by Hugh III, Nancy, daughter Elizabeth (“Liz”), and Everett’s parents.

  Several cartons were stuffed with photographs. Other boxes held birth and marriage and death certificates, expired passports, financial spreadsheets, tax returns, military medals, personal diaries, and hundreds of letters home documenting the lives of three generations of Everetts: their secret hopes, private joys and heartbreaks, their public celebrations and mournings—the intimate history of an emotionally cloistered family gathering dust in a dark room.

  Everett’s boxes sequestered old textbooks, physics and operations research papers, stacks of letters, used airplane tickets, cancelled checks to liquor stores, stained hotel receipts, a deck of playing cards festooned with naked, peroxide blondes, a super-8 porno film with no pretension toward plot, and a scrap of paper on which Everett had scrawled a fallacious “proof” of the existence of God. Several were stuffed with thousands of sheets of yellow legal paper covered with algorithms variously designed to track ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads or to outwit the housing and stock markets or to generate finan
cial spreadsheets on first generation personal computers.

  Another box held artwork made by the kids for Father’s Day. Laying beneath the childish art were letters from some of the most renowned quantum physicists of the day, John Wheeler, Niels Bohr, Norbert Wiener. And there was an ancient Panasonic Dictaphone containing the only known tape recording of Everett: a cocktail party conversation between him and his friend, Charles Misner, made in 1977. (There is a touching scene in Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, where the adult son listens to the tape for the first time, hearing his father’s voice as if back from the dead. In the background, an adolescent Mark is heard pounding on a trap set, gradually drowning out the conversation.)

  After E and the film crew left on a journey across America to confab with his father’s classmates and colleagues, I began sorting through the boxed treasure. Festooned with clip lights illuminating a folding table set with bottles of water, magic markers, and a laptop computer, the basement became a kind of archeological dig as box by box, layer by layer, page by page, scientific and biographical gems emerged from the higgledy-piggledy. Chief among the finds was the original, handwritten draft of Everett’s dissertation. Letters and other papers showed that he had followed the rehabilitation of his theory with great interest, though galled by what he perceived as the failure of great physicists to understand the core of his theory. There were several writings that addressed the burning question of whether or not he had viewed his multiple universes as totally abstract, or as physically real.

  In other cartons, Everett’s mother, Katharine Kennedy Everett, left behind a poignant record of her life in letters and poems. Waves of emotional pain seemed to radiate from boxes containing certain items, particularly Nancy’s intensely intimate diaries, and the alcoholic, depressed Liz’s desperate letters home. And then there were the photographs of the broken family pasted in three funeral books kept safely buried in the basement by the sole-surviving Everett.

  This is a book about anti-heroes. It’s about a tragically dysfunctional American family as reconstructed from intimate records and memories of the living. It’s about the technocratic mindset that waged the Cold War, bringing humanity to the brink of destruction under the banner of rationality. It’s about the seemingly intractable problem of modeling and understanding a complex system from within that same system—be that a quantum system of multiple universes, or a political system composed of mirrored superpowers facing off with hydrogen bombs, or a sad and confused family stumbling toward destruction while surrounded by socio-economic privilege. These three strands—quantum mechanics, computerized war gaming, and the fate of a small, nuclear family shaped during the Cold War—gradually weave together as we tell the story of a powerfully intelligent, but morally conflicted man who significantly affected our world.

  And we take our time doing it, as it is necessary to explain the scientific, historical, and cultural context of Everett’s remarkable ideas, so that we may comprehend why his accomplishments were so vital. At the heart of the tale is the puzzle of probability: that foundation of decision-making that seems so commonsensical and, yet, cannot be explained. Probing probability, Everett attempted to account for how the world of our experience emerges from an indeterministic quantum netherworld. This journey led him to invent one of the strangest, most important ideas in science. It is not just that his nearly impeccable logic leads to multiple universes—it leads to a vision of a completely deterministic reality in which probability itself becomes an illusion. Yet, in his influential job as a war-planner, he relied upon probabilistic equations to build weapons systems assuring destruction. A genius at statistical analysis in both physics and operations research, he invented powerful computer algorithms for use by the military that, if his interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, precipitated the explosion of city-vaporizing hydrogen bombs in worlds beyond number.

  Tracking Everett’s rise and fall as a military consultant provides a glimpse of the top secret paths trod by many Cold War scientists who, despite horrible misgivings about the nature of their work, did it anyway. But in Everett’s case, professional success inside the Beltway did not translate into psychological ease, and the toys of the affluent middle-class did not substitute for the lost nurturing that his children so dearly desired. So why do we care about this man, Hugh Everett III? Is it possible to feel compassion for someone who was so ready to blow up the Earth? And what about the multiple universes? Should we care about them even if we cannot prove that they—and multiple we’s—exist?

  My answer is—yes—we should care about Everett as a person, because his life reflects America’s collective personality during the Cold War and beyond. His story transcends a personal travail—it is about the creeping militarization of science and civil society and the failure of consumerism to provide happiness. And we should care about his theory of many worlds because it sheds some light on how the ancient riddle of probability—coupled to the physicality of information and consciousness—unites physics and philosophy in modeling a purely quantum mechanical reality. But, perhaps, most of all, we should care about Everett not just because of the contribution he made to quantum mechanics and cosmology—whether or not his worlds exist, it is one of the most influential theories in the history of physics—but because the unvarnished story of what happened to his family, as recorded in the boxes in the basement, is an American tragedy—and, yet, it is also a lesson in the quality of forgiveness.

  1 Family Origins: a Sketch

  We gather most of our information by intercepting a small fraction of [the] environment. Different observers agree about reality based on consensus reached in this fashion.

  Wojciech H. Zurek, 19981

  Cosmic wonder

  In this universe, Hugh Everett III was born in Washington, D.C. on November 11, 1930: Armistice Day. That national holiday marked the signing of an unsteady peace by the global powers that fought the First World War. It was celebrated all across America with parades, flag-waving, and patriotic speeches.

  Also on the day that Everett was born, Albert Einstein published “Religion and Science” in the Berliner Tageblatt. The founder of relativity and quantum theory was to pop up in Everett’s life at several pivotal moments. But on this day, Einstein wrote that the best scientists possess a “cosmic religious feeling” and “a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe.” He prayed that a “priestly caste” of scientists would learn to conjure the machinery of peace, not war, and that political leaders would mirror their rationality.

  Unfortunately, in 1939, world war erupted again. This time, the industrial powers mobilized legions of scientists to produce weapons of mass destruction far more lethal than the previous war’s mustard gas, mortars, biplanes, and machine guns. The Second World War concluded with the United States exploding atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the incineration of the Japanese cities, Einstein reflected, “By painful experience we have learned that rational thinking does not suffice to solve the problems of our social life.” Pure science was not, in Einstein’s view, an end in itself. He warned,

  Penetrating research and keen scientific work have often had tragic implications for mankind, producing, on the one hand, inventions which liberated man from exhausting physical labor, making his life richer and easier, but on the other hand, making him a slave to his technological environment, and—most catastrophic of all—creating the means for his own mass destruction. This, indeed, is a tragedy of overwhelming poignancy!2

  When Einstein wrote those words in 1948, Everett was novitiate to a “priestly caste” of scientists serving military-industrialism. His career was typical of the careers of many physicists swept up in the post-war marriage of the academy to the national security state: propelled by a talent for mathematics, it segued seamlessly from high school to college to graduate school to the top secret world inhabited by legions of Cold Warriors idolizing reason.

  Like many of his compatriots, Everett was irreligious and cynical about human nature
. But, deep down, he held on to a sense of cosmic wonder: He burned to reduce the complexity of the universe to rational formulae. This drive to extract order, logic, and beauty from seeming chaos was inherited from both of his parents.

  Family tree (with nicknames)

  Everett’s great-grandfather, Charles Everett, a medical doctor, emigrated from Scotland. He served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War before marrying Virginia Haynes of Virginia. Their son, Hugh Everett, was born in Denton, Texas, a frontier town. Just before the turn of the century, Hugh married Laura Katherine Clardy, also of Virginia, later known to her grandchildren as “Ma Maw.” She was “hard rock” Baptist and a staunch member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Sharp of tongue, she was unforgiving toward what she perceived as the failings of her adult children.3

  Hugh, nicknamed “Day Day” by his children, worked most of his career as a compositor for the Government Printing Office and The Washington Post newspaper in Washington D.C. He briefly owned a small printing company, Terminal Press, during the Great Depression. And he smoked cigarettes.

  Hugh became Hugh Everett, Sr. when Hugh Everett, Jr. was born in 1903 in the District of Columbia, the eldest of four children: Charles Edward (“Jiggs”), of Washington D.C. (who also became a printer), and two sisters, Virginia (“Ginny”), a housewife, and Kathryn (“Kaka”), a school teaching “spinster,” as unmarried women were called in those days. Everett, Jr.’s siblings and their families congregated during the holidays, but they were not a close-knit group. “Day Day” died of a heart attack or stroke in 1958; “Ma Maw” passed away quietly in 1973 at the age of 94.