by Peter Byrne
Tim stood with his toy elephant clutched close, looking helpless at his mother. His wet hair was plastered back; there was a clean, shining look about him.
“I builded a house, Mummy,” he offered politely. “I builded it myself. Out of blocks. Look!”
The children are shunted off to bed. Marta pours a drink, lights a cigarette. Rod asks here why she has bothered to visit the children.
Her face was pinched; she looked for a moment again as though she were about to cry. But she spoke quietly.
“I don’t expect you to understand, Rod, But if you’d been a bigger man—a man with more vision. If you hadn’t been so insufferably self-righteous—”
Rod shouts that she made her choice and must live with it. Marta replies,
“I never wake up mornings but what I think of Tim. I wonder if he’s eating his cereal. If you are attending to his teeth. If he’s forgotten his mother—”
Marta flees, driving, “down the hill, zigzagging crazily.” Nancy reflected about her mother-in-law:
She seems to have been wildly pursuing truth and or beauty ever since [Hugh III went to live with his father], flitting from one answer to another, delving into all philosophies and religions, cults, etc. never being satisfied with any; flitting also from short-term job to job, apartment to different living arrangements, (in the six years I knew her in Washington she lived in at least that many different places), never finding peace of mind, never finding the warmth and love she must’ve needed so desperately.
She seemed tragic to me because of her aloneness, but I could not sympathize with her unwillingness to face things in their proper proportion. Her insistence on exaggerating every day events with rosy-rimmed enthusiasm and continually trying to identify herself in any way with others—so as to belong—this insinuating behavior clashed on many occasions with my Yankee bluntness of expression, etc.
But I had no intentions of becoming further involved in her problems. I knew they were more than I could cope with, that no amount of love that I might be able to give, could undue [sic] the wrong that had made her so. (I couldn’t even love anyone without any problems.) This realization that I abandoned her, so to speak, is one reason why I am haunted by her still. Yet, I know, I could never have given more…. She was a true poet … like the oracle at Delphi, a medium, through which the words of truth and beauty must pass.
In the realm of the Mind
In 1953, The New York Times published3 a breathtakingly abstract poem by Katharine—dedicated to Einstein:
UNIFIED FIELD
(FOR A.E.)
Pure fields of space,
O flowing fields of light,
who shall gauge
these lightning flights
of mind, … only Mind
arching from sun to sun
beyond the blind
groping of scattered minds
who cannot see
the Great Reality
whispers its ultimate Secret
to this mind:
the atom and the universe are One.
In his essay “Religion and Science” Einstein asked why we so easily resort to mystical, anthropomorphic explanations when faced with ontological puzzles.
With primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions—fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal connections is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates illusory beings more or less analogous to itself on whose wills and actions these fearful happenings depend.
But as mysteries are unraveled by scientific experiment, the rational scientist, wrote Einstein,
feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.4
Katharine, like Einstein, like her son, desired a universe that lent existence meaning as part of a sensible whole. Confronting a limit on understanding, she poetically linked her consciousness to a (God-like) Mind. Indeed, some scientifically serious advocates of the Many Worlds theory have also appealed to a linked-minds concept of a non-physical consciousness in an effort to make sense out of quantum reality.
For his part, Everett explicitly rejected consciousness (or Mind) as a causal element in physics—Katharine, however, was a causal, if unconscious factor in his life. His inability to resolve his ambivalent feelings toward her festered, causing him to distrust humanity for reasons he could not fully explain.
3 The Scientist as a Young Man
Peace
by Hugh Everett III1
Millions will rejoice on the day of peace,
After this desperate war has ended,
When the murderous cries of battle cease,
And the deep gnarled scars of war have mended.
Then mankind will work to rebuild the earth,
And the draftsmen will plan both night and day,
As earthlings unite in freedoms rebirth;
But the leaders that launched the war must pay.
All those at fault must be taken in hand,
And be punished for their barbarous crimes.
Justice shall reign again through all the land,
And happiness shall once more bless the times.
We must scour the earth of war’s harsh sorrow.
So that lasting Peace shall rule the morrow.
Childhood
When Everett was growing up in the 1930s and 40s, Bethesda, Maryland was a racially segregated suburb serving highly educated professionals. The neighborhood provided plenty of parks and recreational space for children, although, even as a youth, Everett was not one for taking nature walks or playing sports. He loved reading science fiction and playing with gadgets and playing practical jokes on his elders.
Nancy wrote in her journal that, all of his life, Everett was an “Army brat.” On the one hand, “He could talk with grownups from an early age and loved to embarrass his father in front of ‘top brass’ and vice versa.” On the other hand, “This is a guy who at the tender age of 12 wrote a letter to Albert Einstein, and received a reply! I think his mom—K.K.—may have influenced him [to write that letter].”
Everett’s long lost letter to Albert Einstein apparently claimed to have solved the paradox of what happens when an irresistible force meets an immoveable object. Nancy thought he had written it as a “hoax,” to see if he could fool the great man. Graciously, Einstein wrote back on June 11, 1943,
There is no such thing like an irresistible force and immovable body. But there seems to be a very stubborn boy who has forced his way victoriously through strange difficulties created by himself for this purpose.
For his entire life, Everett was irresistibly attracted toward wrangling solutions out of logically immovable paradoxes. He enjoyed pondering looping, recursive statements, such as, “All men from Crete are liars; I am from Crete.” And he had fun toying with supposedly logical arguments for the existence of God as a prime mover that fell into infinite regression by failing to answer how there can be a first cause of the universe that does not itself have a cause which requires a cause which requires … and so on.
He looked at the universe as an engineer, searching for its central mechanism. But Katharine tried to cultivate the dreamer in him. His post-apocalyptic “Peace” is remarkable considering his ultimate vocation. More typical was “Checkers”:
In checkers when you get a king
You’r so happy that you sing.
Then the other person says, “I quit”
And you’r so mad that you just sit.
He also wrote a very short play about winning the favor of a girl he liked by saving her from kidnappers. And for a seventh grade class assignment (also typed by Katharine), the future game theorist wrote a two-page short story, “The Bone of Mutt’sburg.” The dog-King of Mutt’sburg is preparing to eat a meal of “bone al la
mode.” A cat from Catsville complains that the dogs are killing all the cows for meat, depriving the cats of milk. The dog-King shrugs off the cat, who snatches the bone al la mode. Enraged, the dog-King sends an army of dogs after the thieving cat, who slyly leads them away from the cow pasture, while other cats steal the cows. In the end, the dog-King proposes to kill only half the cows, if the cats return them all. The warring animals sign a truce, and live in peace happily ever after.
But for unconditional love, Everett turned to his step-mother. He drew a woman and a boy kissing, making the sound: “SMACKO!” It was captioned, “Dear mama Sarah: I love you very much and I would like to kiss you. In fact, I will!”
High school
Shortly after Einstein replied, Everett won a half scholarship to St. John’s College, a private military high school in Washington D.C. run by Catholic Christian Brothers. The school motto, “Religio Scientia,” means “religion and knowledge.” Everett was a life-long atheist, but he did not let that stand in his way as St. John’s was well-regarded academically and socially. Cadets were enrolled in the Army Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps and required to take parade drill and weapons training. The United States was at war and the Army JROTC was a conduit into combat.
Sarah Thrift Everett, circa 1935.
“Pudge” and Sarah, circa 1940.
In the spring of 1944, Everett was rated an overall “perfect” for attendance, general conduct, and grades. A typical report card for his high school career shows a 95 in Mathematics, a 93 in English, and a 90 in Christian Doctrine. But he flunked Military Drill with an amazingly low 45 (70 was failure). The St John’s yearbook for 1946 shows a uniformed, sullen Everett standing at attention with Company G. In a happier photo, he calculates at a blackboard with other members of the Mathematics Club. The caption: “Professor Einstein’s successors at practice!”
St. Johns cadet Hugh Everett III, circa 1944.
Never athletic, Everett found a role for himself at student sporting events: Using one of the first commercially available strobe lights, he took photographs of the skirmishes in high school football and basketball games and sold them to local newspapers. He had a keen sense of lighting, once winning an award for a pretty photograph of Tidal Basin cherry trees in full bloom.
His two best friends at St. Johns were also “non-athletes,” Ralph Mohr and Fred Wilson. They remember Everett as a “chunky, round-faced” kid, brilliant in math and physics, and also a good pool player. Because of his loudly avowed atheism, he was labeled “the heretic” by devout classmates.
Everett was “embarrassed to death” when Sarah2 called him “Pudgie” in front of his friends. “He told us never to call him that,” Mohr recalled.
Mohr and Everett had a lucrative business taking photographs of couples at high school dances and selling orders for prints on the spot. Later, they went on numerous double dates around Washington, including to Rosecroft Raceway, a local horse track. Using a slide rule, Everett developed a system for handicapping horse races, but got bored when he realized that his predictions were exactly the same as the racing form’s. After graduation, the friends lost touch. Mohr, a retired mechanical engineer, was pleasantly surprised 60 years later when he picked up a copy of Scientific American at his dentist’s office and found a profile of his old pal. He called Wilson, a retired Air Force chaplain, and they reminisced, digging out fading photographs of Everett.
“He was a good friend and I enjoyed him tremendously,” Mohr said. “How sad that he did not have the rewards which his great intelligence should have obtained for him.”3
The freshman
Everett graduated with honors from military school in 1948, and transformed into a freshman at nearby Catholic University, where he majored in chemical engineering. The university was owned and operated by the Roman Catholic Church; its 200-acre campus surrounded by an urban community known as “Little Rome,” because of the large number of Catholic institutions settled in the shadow of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Everett’s paternal grandparents lived a short walk away on Grant Circle, and he often roomed there, enjoying the friendly, cosmopolitan neighborhood.
He quickly became an academic star, and a campus character. Classmate Louis Painter says, “I remember Everett as easygoing, as a brilliant student. He saved our butts in calculus class, as we had a total klutz as an instructor.” Everett and Painter ran on a joint ticket for freshman class office—Everett for President, Painter for Vice President. Despite campaigning from the back of a new convertible, they lost.
Col. Everett and Pudge, far left.
Painter, a chemical engineer, remembers that, “Everett was much interested in the science of Dianetics,” a self-improvement program invented by science fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard.4
In late 1949, Hubbard published his first article on Dianetics in a pulp sci-fi magazine beloved by Everett, Astounding Science Fiction. The core idea of Dianetics was that by “auditing” painful memories a person can increase his intelligence while eliminating emotional problems and physical illness. There is no evidence that in his post-student years Everett gave Dianetics or, the shadowed, quasi-religious cult into which it evolved, Scientology, any attention, but, for the rest of his life, he refused to visit doctors, and he believed in the social superiority of uncommonly intelligent beings, such as himself. And like Hubbard, he was a sexual libertine.
Although Catholic University offered expertly taught, non-theologically driven science courses, Everett was required to take two classes in religion: Fundamental Beliefs and Spiritual Foundations of American Life. Nancy wrote, “He drove devout Jesuits to distraction with scientific questioning.”5 Everett, whose academic file records him as “non-Catholic,” aced all of his freshman year science and math courses and was handed a “C” in Fundamental Beliefs. But he earned an “A” in Philosophy of Science, which is noteworthy, considering the philosophical waves his many worlds theory is generating.
The case against God
While at Catholic University, Everett reportedly constructed a “logical proof” against the existence of God that caused one of his professors to despair of religious faith. Distressed by causing ontological horror, Everett vowed never to use this argument on a person of faith again; but that did not stop him from tinkering with it, or trying it out on people from time to time, despite his best intentions.6
According to a Pentagon colleague, Joseph Clifford, he once applied what he called the “universal existence theorem” to a discussion of the existence of the mythological winged horse, Pegasus. One discussant was a Roman Catholic, so Everett had politely substituted the horse for God. According to Clifford, Everett’s logic caused the Catholic to admit that believing in God is purely a matter of faith, and not subject to the rigor of mathematical proof.7
Theologians throughout the ages have striven to construct a logical proof of God’s existence. The abstract reasoning of St. Anselm of Canterbury’s ontological argument in the 11th century is typically expressed: “God is greater than anything that can be conceived. God exists as a conception in the human mind. Existence in reality is greater than existence in the mind. Therefore, God exists in reality.” This is sophistry, though. Anselm presupposes that God exists by defining God as existing, so it is not a proof.
In the 1970s, the legendary logician, Kurt Gödel, privately circulated his attempt to improve on St. Anselm’s ontological proof; it would have intrigued Everett as Gödel employed “modal” logic—a philosophical method that examines the validity of all possible truths, or contingencies, or “ifs.” In his modal argument, Gödel postulated the existence of all possible worlds. He then argued, in essence, that if it is possible that God exists, God must exist in some possible world. Therefore, God exists.
A quarter century after Everett’s death, in his son’s basement, a scrap of paper was found inside a cigar box full of torn ticket stubs and assorted junk. On it, in Everett’s handwriting, was scrawled a deliberately
fallacious “Improvement on ontological proof,” written in the symbolic language of the predicate calculus.
It is, of course, not possible to prove that God or winged horses do not exist, so Everett’s disproof focuses on the fatal flaw in the argument for God’s existence that begins with “If God exists …”
Mocking the argument as “tautological,”8 Everett began with the statement that either a proposition is true or its negation is true. He then highlighted the flaw in the standard ontological argument, which treats existence as a property. In order to have a property, an object must already exist. This logic leads to the absurd statement: “Everything exists, or there is something that does not exist.” As there cannot exist even one thing that does not exist, he concludes, “Everything must exist. In particular, then, if x exists, and x is God, then God exists.” His point was that it is not valid to use “if” in an existence argument because “if” presupposes existence in arguing for it.