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

by Peter Byrne

  Ontological “proof.”

  Everett may have had Gödel on his mind when he scrawled his tautology because the many worlds interpretation is sometimes construed by religious people as validating the possibility of God’s existence—despite the fact that the many worlds interpretation does not declare all things to exist. At any rate, the scrap debunks that sort of argument and it is probably the critique that felled his professor’s faith.9

  Learning curve

  Col. Hugh Everett Jr. (far left) in Sicily, circa 1945.

  After returning from Europe with a shoebox full of campaign ribbons, Colonel Everett was posted to Headquarters European Command. He and Sarah moved to Wetzlar, Germany. In the fall of 1949, Everett took a year-long leave of absence from Catholic University to join them. He monitored several classes at the University of Heidelberg in Heidelberg, Germany, renowned for its theology, philosophy, and science. On frequent vacations, the family toured the continent’s war-blasted cities; the two Hughs taking hundreds of black and white photographs of landmarks and landscapes, which were later pasted into albums almost devoid of people.

  Military Wives, circa 1950, Sarah Everett third from left.

  Ever the prankster, Everett sneaked in and out of East Germany to visit a Spring Fair in Leipzig. Light-hearted rebellion only went so far, though: His first security clearance application, filed three later, related that, “Upon return reported to the S-2 of Wetzlar Military Post and gave a detailed account of what I saw.”

  It was back to Catholic University for his sophomore year. He shouldered a seven-course load of advanced chemistry and mathematics, racking up a 3.8 grade average. During summer break, he traipsed around central Europe again with his family. In the fall, he signed up for ten courses in engineering, chemistry, and physics. Gung ho for science, he went to summer school, studying electricity and partial differential equations; and moved back in with his father and step-mother.

  Colonel Everett now commanded Cameron Station in Alexandria, Virginia, a large Army base that was headquarters to the Defense Logistics Agency, which managed supplies required by the globe-trotting American military.10 Richly salaried at $12,000, he bought a four-bedroom, colonial-style brick mansion in a hilly, wealthy suburb, Belle Haven, Virginia, a dozen miles south of Washington D.C.

  Sarah and Hugh Jr. Photo by Hugh Everett III.

  During his senior year at Catholic University, Everett tackled twelve technical courses, including Atomic Physics. His relatively low (for him) 3.6 grade point average that year was the product of a “C” in chemistry lab, and “Bs” in Lectures on Contracts and Spiritual Foundations of American Life, which offset his usual harvest of “As.” He and a classmate wrote an unpublished chemical engineering paper, “Fluid Flow Through Randomly Packed Beds of Raschig Rings,” which appears to have been expertly typed by Katharine, no mean feat considering the number of equations used. (Raschig rings are small tube cuttings used to pack volatile liquids in industrial settings, and the paper was heavy on statistical analysis.)

  In June 1953, Everett graduated with a bachelors degree in chemical engineering, magna cum laude; he had also completed the course work for a degree in mathematics. That summer, Everett received the first of many security clearances from the federal government and worked as an associate mathematician doing operations research at the Silver Spring, Maryland field office of the Applied Physics Laboratory run by Johns Hopkins University. He earned a respectable salary of $320 per month.

  His specialty was analyzing the dynamics of servomechanisms, i.e. analog devices, such as bomb sights, that rely on “feedback loops” to automatically correct tracking errors. During this time, the lab (working with the Army’s Operations Research Office) ran one of the first computer simulations in the history of operations research, a study of the air defense of North America.11

  It must have been an inspiring few months for a young mathematician with a practical bent: Operations research was an exciting, growing field. It applied “cybernetics” to the study of warfare. An unprecedented amount of government funding was flowing into military research labs designing advanced weaponry systems controlled by computers. And Everett was eager to ride the wave of money and high technology.

  “Cybernetics” (based on the Greek word for “steersman”) was coined by the polymath Norbert Wiener. Pioneers in cybernetic theory included Wiener; John von Neumann of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; the British computationist, Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Cybernetics gave birth to an epochal epigram: “Information is physical.”12

  Defining information as physical removed thinking from the exclusive realm of human consciousness, or Mind. As a discipline, cybernetics—the interlocking relationship of information, entropy, and probability—began shaping the development of computer-based technologies while Everett was in elementary school. Cybernetics inspired the invention of the digital computer; it extruded “C3” (command, control, and communication) systems that enabled the waging of hair-trigger nuclear war; it profoundly influenced the structure of corporate advertising and psychological warfare strategies; it affected quantum theory. Everett’s innovative work in game theory, quantum mechanics, and software design was a product of the merger of cybernetics and information theory; we shall delve deeply into these matters as his life unfolds.

  The best student ever

  As graduation from Catholic University approached, Everett scored in the 99th percentile on the advanced physics section of the Graduate Record Examination, a newly invented standardized test administered by Educational Testing Services, of Princeton, New Jersey. Tellingly, he scored below average in social studies, literature, and fine arts. In April, he applied (six weeks past the official deadline) for admission to the graduate school in physics at Princeton University. As a back-up to Princeton, the tardy applicant also applied to Catholic University’s graduate school, but he need not have worried: Princeton’s physics faculty, especially its world-class quantum theorist, Eugene Wigner, was eager to accept him on the basis of a portfolio of strong recommendations from his undergraduate professors.

  Associate Professor of Mathematics at Catholic University, William W. Boone, wrote,

  This is a once-in-a-lifetime recommendation for I think it most unlikely that I shall ever again encounter a student I can give such complete and unreserved support.

  Everett is by far the best student I have had at Princeton, Rutgers, or Catholic University. Everett has a better knowledge of mathematics than most of the graduate students at Catholic University and probably no graduate student is his equal in native ability. Since his sophomore year he had been taking advanced mathematics courses—combinatorial topology, point set topology, real and complex variables, modern algebra, etc.—many simply as an auditor because of the administrative limitations on the number of hours a student may carry.

  In all of these courses he has given an outstanding performance, showing a thorough and frequently creative mastery of the subject. Everett also has worked widely on sophisticated mathematical texts of his own…. (This year, by the way, he has been taking for credit the game theory course given by Princeton University’s Professor [Albert] Tucker at American University.)

  For Tucker’s game theory course, Everett wrote (and his obliging mother typed) a paper called “A Simplification of the Procedure of Determining the Basic Solutions of Matrix Games.” Never published, the paper is in the words of Harold Kuhn, who co-taught Tucker’s course in game theory, “a nice piece of juvenelis and might have merited publication at the time it was written.”13

  The introduction to game theory profoundly influenced Everett and he quickly absorbed its utilitarian ethos into his personality.

  The Head of the Physics Department at Catholic University observed, in a separate letter of recommendation, “He has a very agreeable personality and excellent manners.” Even the local draft board was impressed: “You attained a score of 85 on the Selective Servi
ce qualification test, which is very good. Congratulations!” As the last place on Earth that Everett wanted to go was boot camp, that was not good news; the ceasefire that ended the bloody Korean War was not to be signed until July 1953, and other wars and invasions and occupations loomed. Fortunately for him, his student deferment was extended when he was accepted into graduate school. He would not be safe from the draft until reaching age 26, but he planned to go into military operations research after he got his doctorate, which would exempt him from armed service.

  In only its second year of existence, the National Science Foundation granted Everett a stipend to pay his Princeton tuition fees, plus $100 a month for room, board, and expenses. The federally funded science foundation was mandated to sponsor the higher education of a virtual army of promising young mathematicians and physicists demanded by what President Dwight Eisenhower was to label a “military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower could have said “military-industrial-academic complex,” as many of the nation’s top science schools, including Massachusetts Institute for Technology, Stanford University, California Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, and Princeton University, were deeply woven into the institutional fabric of Cold War militarism. The Pentagon depended on elite colleges to train tens of thousands of technicians and theoreticians to staff a spreading public-private network of corporate- and university-sponsored research labs and “think tanks” dedicated to inventing not only the machinery of the Cold War, but also to inventing moral, philosophical, and political rationales justifying it.14

  Everything is information

  Life was good for Everett in 1953: in late summer, scholarship and draft deferment secure, he packed up his belongings, ready to move to Princeton, hoping to leave Pudge behind. And to fire up a sex life.

  He boxed up his personal library. It included Wiener’s best-selling book, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), which was all the rage among operations researchers. In many ways, Everett’s early exposure to Wiener was the touchstone of his intellectual life.

  In Cybernetics, Wiener defined information as “negentropy,” i.e. the opposite of “entropy,” which is a measure of the energy in a system. The Second Law of Thermodynamics declares that in a closed system entropy increases over time, leading to heat-death, dispersion, chaos, ever-increasing disorder. Wiener noted that the greater the negentropy, or order in a system: the easier it is to predict specific events, because in a more ordered system there are fewer “degrees of freedom,” defined as the number of variables, or the number of possible configurations of the system’s components. Conversely, in a less orderly system, there are generally more degrees of freedom and, consequently, less information, and less predictability.

  Crediting Claude Shannon and statistician R. A. Fisher with discovering the same idea about the physical nature of what constitutes information, Wiener observed,

  Hugh Everett III enters Princeton, 1953.

  The transmission of information is impossible save as a transmission of alternatives…. To cover this aspect of communication engineering, we had to develop a statistical theory of the amount of information, in which the unit amount of information was that transmitted as a single decision between equally probable alternatives…. The notion of the amount of information attaches itself very naturally to a classical notion in statistical mechanics: that of entropy. Just as the amount of information in a system is a measure of its degree of organization, so the entropy of a system is a measure of its degree of disorganization; and the one is simply the negative of the other.15

  For Everett, like Wiener, probability was a measure of information, and vice versa. But probability is more than a simple measure: it is also a system of belief. We use the laws of probability to assign proportional values to beliefs about the future. These beliefs about future events are based on having observed the relative frequency of past occurrences of that same type of event. It is thought that the normal precepts of rationality require us to make decisions based on probabilities. Precepts about probability and rationality inform all of Everett’s most original work, including his theory of multiple universes, and we shall explore them thoroughly.

  During the Second World War, Wiener performed vital operations research, including working on radar and bullet and bomb targeting mechanisms. But he refused to do any more research for the military after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And he criticized scientists who sold their services to Moloch. In all likelihood, Everett read Wiener’s admonition in Cybernetics:

  A certain precise mixture of religion, pornography, and pseudo science will sell an illustrated newspaper. A certain blend of wheedling, bribery, and intimidation will induce a young scientist to work on guided missiles or the atomic bomb.16

  But he did not follow Wiener’s example.

  His box of books also contained Patterns of Sexual Behavior, by C. S. Ford and Frank Beach (1952). This soon-to-be-classic study of sexuality in human and other animal species was probably of less theoretical import to Everett than it was of operational necessity. Post-war, suburban American youth tended to be woefully uninformed when it came to the nitty-gritty of sexual practice; but that was changing for Everett’s generation. Alfred Kinsey’s bombshell Report on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was published in 1948, followed even more explosively by his Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. Kinsey gave middle-class intellectuals permission to enjoy sex and, in many cases, to do so promiscuously.

  During his married years, Everett collected sex manuals, pornographic novels, and hard-core 8mm porn films. At the time of his death, he possessed several well-thumbed copies of The 120 Days of Sodom or the School of Licentiousness by the Marquis de Sade. He probably enjoyed reading Sodom for its incestuous, ultra-violent, taboo sex, and he espoused a form of de Sade’s ultra-libertarian, solipsist philosophy. But his attraction to de Sade was to come much later. In the summer of 1953, unbeknownst to the relatively innocent young scientist as he packed up his books, his future wife, Nancy Gore, was newly arrived in Princeton town.

  It was to be two years before they hooked up for life.

  4 Stranger in Paradise

  If I stand starry-eyed

  That’s a danger in paradise

  For mortals who stand beside

  An angel like you.1

  Nancy Gore Everett, circa 1957.

  Nancy Gordon Gore was born at Amherst, Massachusetts on February 13, 1930 to Jane Pollard Gore and her husband, Harold “Kid” Gore, who headed the Department of Physical Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The Gores operated Camp Najerog (“Gore, Jan” spelled backwards), a 300-acre wilderness camp for children on a Vermont lake. The family was outdoorsy, close-mouthed, politically conservative.

  Nancy attended private girl’s schools. She spent her summers idyllically: horseback riding, swimming, boating, hiking and singing campfire songs; as an adult, she remained a nature lover, enjoying long walks, bird-watching, gardening.

  Her friends found her to be a pleasant, kind, fun-loving adult, if somewhat shy. She had a sense of humor, laughing with a self-conscious giggle, and, in private, she was given to crying jags. Early in life, she developed the habit of writing her streaming thoughts in dairies, unmailed letters, and handy scraps of paper. The intimate record of her life reveals an inwardly tormented soul, struggling to make sense out of romance, sexuality, politics, nuclear war, and her strange, brilliant husband.

  In her journals, she described herself as a child trapped in an adult’s body. She evaluated herself as if through the eyes of others, and found herself lacking. And she was indecisive, usually waiting for others to act, before following. Although she cherished the idea of personal independence, she was afraid of being without a man; so, she modeled the behavioral conventions of suburban housewifery, clinging to the subservient role that her mother-in-law, Katharine, had so fiercely rejected. The cheerful independence she had so effortlessly enjoyed as a child with the run of a summ
er camp eluded her adult grasp.

  In 1952, Nancy graduated with a B.A. in English literature from Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia. During her years at the all-female school, Nancy suffered from bouts of exhilaration alternating with existential nausea. She was easily floored. One day she declared her strong affection for a vivacious classmate, and was devastated by the woman’s cool response.

  I am never sure of myself, and I am suspicious of people who seem to be, and admire those who really are…. For me, any original idea that comes to me (and the creation of something completely new is a miracle to me) is so quick and fleeting that it has disappeared before I can catch hold of it…. I know I haven’t the capabilities to achieve outstanding feats, but still and all, somewhere there must be a little bit of zip, squeak, life, or whatever, that is there waiting to be awakened, stimulated…. I can sum up nothing, but see only each individual part separately, subjectively, and without a clear picture of the whole…. I am sitting stagnant in a mist of nowhere and nothing…. The only stimulation that seems to move me is to get thrown into a situation where I must either sink or swim.