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

by Peter Byrne

  She was dizzy and in constant pain and had trouble breathing; nonetheless, she returned to work doing research and managing an office for an anthropologist, Edward T. Hall, who had a government grant to study the effects of crowding on the sensory perceptions of humans.3

  During the next six months, she was

  extremely fatigued all the time and though I could type and use my left hand normally from the elbow down … I could never lift it above shoulder level and when I tried to follow the [therapeutic] exercises suggested, the donor site of the skin graft [on her shoulder] would break open and cause me excruciating pain.

  She asked her doctor if the tumor had metastasized. He said, “No, Ma’am.”

  I became disgusted with the whole process and began to study Christian Science. I secured the services of a practitioner, but she could not seem to help me in alleviating the pain in the shoulder, the fatigue, shortness of breath, and feeling that the skin graft was pressing on my lungs and heart. Also, new lesions appeared that bled.

  Abandoning Christian Science, she returned to the hospital and saw a different doctor. She asked him if her mastectomy had been competently performed. He said, “yes,” and prescribed radiation.4 After a long course of X-ray treatments, “the arm began to swell enormously and I began to feel nauseated.” She lost her $375 a month job; her savings “dwindled and melted.” Social Security paid $100 a month, and she received free house-cleaning and cooking services. But her rent was $97, groceries were $30; she scrounged for cab fares to get to medical treatments.

  In late September, she was back in the hospital.

  I broke the lease at the apt…. and Nancy came and supervised the moving of my furniture to her home…. She agreed to help out financially and see me through the crisis.

  But after Everett returned from the Xavier conference, he, Nancy, and Liz went to Kitty Hawk for a vacation. A friend drove Katharine to the Kensington Gardens Sanitarium in nearby Maryland on October 12, where she collapsed in despair.

  I often cried and sometimes became hysterical and could not eat…. I lay for three nights in a torn, blood-stained slip. I had little or no nursing care. Then Barbara Smith, a night nurse came, took off the filthy slip, secured a pink-flowered gown and bathed me, washed my back & cleaned me up. I felt like human being again – not a sick animal.

  “Things gradually fell into a pattern here. Actually, I like it tremendously and now get excellent care from the staff,” she told Nurse Gantley. She asked for some kind of narcotic that would not make her vomit, perhaps Excedrin, or Nytol. She asked for an oxygen tent.

  Sometimes at nights I cannot breathe and am aware of an extremely cold spot, about the size of a silver dollar on the heart (lungs?). Covering my chest with a blanket does not take away the cold spot.

  New lumps appeared on her right breast and neck. Her mouth was “frozen” with abscessed teeth. She lost the ability to speak, but she tried to be optimistic, communicating by writing on yellow legal pads.

  I like it here at Kensington Gardens so much and do feel I am getting better in spite of the nausea and inability to take food.

  Here the account abruptly ends.

  Katharine lingered at the sanitarium for ten weeks. Nancy and Elizabeth visited a few times, bringing jars of baby food and air freshener and stationery. There is no record of Everett, who had an aversion to hospitals, visiting his mother. But his paternal grandmother (Ma Maw), who was also in a nursing home, dropped Katharine a card:

  Nancy tells me that you like where you are…. I think contentment is the greatest blessing we can have…. Hope you see Elizabeth often, she is such a darling, talks to me over the phone and will sing to me a song sometimes when she feels like it.

  Katharine was also visited by literary and political friends. One of her visitors was Dame Adelaide Lord Livingstone, a world-renowned peace activist. Of her dying friend, Livingstone told Nancy that, “She knew beauty, but she didn’t know reality.”

  As she declined, Katharine wrote letters to old friends from her college days. She told them about her temporary indisposition (she planned to be cured by Christmas), and how swell her family life was, and how proud she was of her son.

  [He] has been married for some time to a sweet New England girl … and she is dear as a daughter to me. I also have a darling grandchild, Elizabeth (aged 5) and another child expected next Spring!

  You know my son did very well…. He got his PhD from Princeton before he was 30 years old and has a fine job now! … at the Pentagon, where he is head of the mathematical techniques section of WSEG (IDA) and has a ‘cosmic’ security clearance. He does computer-oriented research and travels all over…. He is one of the new ‘space’ planners…. My life is full with my son’s family and my work!

  One friend wrote back:

  Glad you are recuperating rapidly…. It is thrilling to think that that small mite of humanity of 31 years ago (HE III) is now in the rocket-computing business…. Yes, Ken, you should be very proud in having made such a contribution to civilization.

  Everett and child Liz, circa 1962.

  Days before she died, Katharine received a report she had requested, “The Ways and Power of Love,” from the Harvard University Research Center in Creative Altruism. The organization promoted the concept that only love and non-religious altruism will change the world because,

  Tomorrow the whole world could become democratic, and yet wars and bloody strife would not be eliminated because democracies happen to be no less belligerent and strife-infected than autocracies.

  Among Katharine’s effects was a flyer, “Women Strike for Peace,” calling for an end to nuclear testing due to the discovery of Strontium-90 in milk. Also on her bedside table was a flyer calling for the abolition of the House Un-American Activities Committee. And a letter from a nursing aide:

  Mrs. Everett you have been great to me, teaching me how to write a book in which I am still working on…. I only wish I had a mom like you.

  In a one-paragraph last will and testament, Katherine left the only possession she valued, her literary estate, to her son. She bequeathed him any royalties from publication, and asked that he and his heirs preserve her papers “for a period of at least one hundred years.”

  And she wrote a final poem, “The Heart’s Landscape”:

  Who will chart the road to the heart’s secret fortress,

  Through tangled forests, weary lands …

  The Mother waits: the lost Child stumbles home.

  By Christmas morning, Katharine, 59, was dead.

  Travels with Q

  Everett was a constant traveler. One week, he was in Austin, Texas at a computer conference. Then it was off to RAND in Santa Monica to think the unthinkable. He appears to have been a regular visitor to a lab in Princeton that served the National Security Agency.5 At Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico, he worked on artificial intelligence, helping to create a path-breaking “associative memory” system that mimicked the operation of human memory.6

  One morning, “Mr. & Mrs. Q. Everett” flew to Hartford, Connecticut; “Q” was Everett’s security clearance level, so traveling under that name was not very secure, but flaunting it must have amused him in the same way that taking a photo of a White House courier would tickle him a decade later.

  In June 1963, he attended another closed door science conference, “The Nature of Time,” at Cornell University, sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. It was attended by high caliber physicists: Wheeler, Mr. X (aka Richard Feynman), Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi, Misner, Rosenfeld and others. But it was an odd, unproductive event.

  The main topic of discussion was the irreversibility of time. Rosenfeld, applying Bohr’s complementarity model, propounded that time’s arrow was imposed on the universe by observers and “the conditions of observation.” Others said the arrow existed independently of observers. One reviewer of the conference papers commented,

  Indeed it is disappointing to find that the discussion of philosop
hical issues by a group of outstanding physicists is in such a low level.7

  Conference organizer, T. Gold, reported, sadly,

  It is an embarrassment for a scientist who has concerned himself with the basic nature of the physical laws to have to admit that the coordinate system in which the laws are embedded is mysterious…. Introspective understanding of the flow of time is basic to all our physics, and yet it is not clear how this idea of time is derived or what status it ought to have in the description of the physical world.

  Most young persons beginning work in a field believe it to be fairly systematic and well understood, and as they learn more are disappointed at the muddled thinking, the ignorance, and the uncertainty among experts. This disillusionment is an essential part of the learning process. It is this that usually gives the student the courage to enter the fray himself.8

  Wheeler delivered a paper suggesting that our perception of the direction of time is a function of the fact that human observers are subject to the laws of thermodynamics, i.e. entropy governs our perception of time. And then he made a remark that must have pleased Everett:

  The universe is not a system that we can observe from outside; the observer is a part of what he observes. Observation under these conditions presents new features; Everett’s so-called ‘relative state formulation’ of quantum mechanics does provide one self-consistent way of describing such situations. Although we are very far from having seen our way through these problems, there is a well-defined formalism in which to carry out the analysis.9

  Mr. X ruminated,

  I have never found myself able to use the concept of probability except in an inconsistent, indefensible way.10

  And,

  It’s a very interesting thing in physics that the laws tell us about permissible universes, whereas we only have one universe to describe.11

  One can imagine Everett grinning, superciliously, from the safety of the back row.

  Winding down WSEG

  Young Everett had the fate of the world in his hands; he was not inclined to waste his time on scholarly frays. He was, however, looking for new opportunities. WSEG was caught up in an internal power struggle at the Pentagon, and Everett’s job was becoming increasingly unpleasant and precarious.

  After the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, Richard M. Bissell, the CIA planning director in charge of the ill-conceived plot, resigned and was appointed president of IDA. The non-profit corporation was growing into one of the country’s largest, most prolific, most secretive military think tanks. Bissell wanted to use scientists like Everett on non-military projects to generate more income. Concerned about the security of IDA’s private sector work, Pentagon officials suggested that WSEG’s access to Q level information should be restricted. And Congress started asking hard questions about whether or not WSEG scientists were worth the premium salaries they earned.12 Concerned, the Joint Chiefs slashed WSEG’s budget.

  In the spring of 1964, Everett and six scientists13 resigned en masse from WSEG to form Lambda Corp. Everett was a principal owner and the chairman of the board of directors. The company started up with a portfolio of lucrative contracts to do much of the same work that they had been doing at WSEG. Pugh, who was by then working at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, came on board bearing an ACDA contract. Besides performing SIOP testing, ABM modeling, and civil defense planning, Everett was determined to turn other projects he had worked on at WSEG—including a prototype of a word processing program—to commercial advantage. He was soon earning a salary of $35,000—$213,000 in 2008 dollars.

  Having fun

  Like many suburban couples during the Cold War, the Everetts were immersed in a culture of consumerism through which flowed a current of justifiable paranoia. If the world was going to end in a radioactive bang, better have some “fun,” reasoned many middle-class Americans. Or so observed Erich Fromm, who explained the psychology of consumerism in The Sane Society:

  Leisure time consumption is determined by industry, as are the commodities [the consumer] buys; his taste is manipulated, he wants to see and to hear what he is conditioned to want to see and to hear; entertainment is an industry like any other, the customer is made to buy fun as he is made to buy dresses and shoes. The value of the fun is determined by its success on the market, not by anything which could be measured in human terms.14 … So people do worry, feel inferior, inadequate, guilty. They sense that they live without living, that life runs through their hands like sand.15

  During their first years of marriage, the Everetts enjoyed a vibrant sex life. Their bedside library bristled with pornography and sex manuals. Birth control pills took the stress out of fornicating at will. But the luster wore thin when Everett started what Nancy called his “side things.” She decided to cast aside the pills and get pregnant again.

  I was determined to have a 2nd child to validate our marriage and love etc etc – I was very happy with 2nd pregnancy – and felt great physically … Hugh was not particularly interested in having a ‘family.’ But maybe it grew on him, like the pets.16

  And, so, Mark Oliver Everett was born on April 10, 1963, at the tail end of the Baby Boom.

  Baby Mark Everett, 1963.

  The WSEG-Lambda group was tightly knit professionally and socially—they worked and played and flirted and consumed together. But not long after Mark’s birth, the Everetts stunned their fun-loving circle of friends by declaring an open-marriage—they were free to have fun affairs—with their friends’ spouses.

  One gets the impression from Nancy’s dairies and letters that she participated in the swinging lifestyle to keep intact a modicum of self-respect in the wake of her husband’s compulsive philandering.

  I was playing [a] traditional, helpless role. You put up with whatever nonsense and go on to greater goal. I truly believed we were growing and getting on with mutual understanding…. I had not taken seriously husband’s side things. They were always side things. No real threat to marriage to me and they weren’t.

  Communication was not the hallmark of their marriage, yet they were loyal to each other. Nancy observed,

  My life is too defined by parameters of those I touch. Too much, I lose my identity in others…. My husband used to say he couldn’t tell how I felt. I didn’t speak up. What did he want from me? For me to be less childish. My reactions were childish he said. I ran away blah. [But] Hugh was there to take care of me when other [situations] fell apart.

  There was anger and regret in her motivations, however:

  Like Ann Dean used to say—if Hugh wasn’t my husband, I wouldn’t have ‘played around’ with others spouses as I did in retaliation to H. Just because we were having an ‘open marriage’ didn’t mean the rest of the social set appreciated this. But they all excused my behavior because they knew I had been hurt by H.

  But the first time she cast aside her natural shyness, kissing another man in front of her husband, she was surprised that he got upset.

  The kiss

  It was the summer of 1964. The Cuban missile crisis had come and gone, terrifying Everett and his colleagues with the near miss of nuclear war. Then, Kennedy had been assassinated. Goldwater (whom Everett disliked) was running for president on a hard-line platform against Lyndon Johnson (who was himself no slouch as a militarist). The Greeks and the Turks were fighting a war over the island of Cyprus that could spread to the superpowers. The constantly escalating war on Vietnam was more of a disaster every day. The impoverished inner cities were about to explode in riotous protest.

  So, the operations researchers had a party.

  Nancy had a few drinks and started “smooching” with “L,” one of Everett’s business partners. On the drive home, Nancy confessed that she had fallen in love with “L,” although they had not yet had sex. Everett exploded.

  The next day, Nancy flew with Mark and Liz to Amherst to visit her parents. She and her angry husband wrote letters back and forth—only hers have survived. Her letters provide an insight into their marr
iage, and probably the marriages of millions of suburban couples searching for sexual identity in an increasingly rootless society. As the Fifties turned into the Sixties, affluent, literate consumers who read Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Lawrence Durrell, and Norman Mailer, people like the Everetts, openly questioned the value of monogamy.

  Nancy wrote,

  There are so many ways of looking at the demise, or temporary failure of our joint prospect. I still feel a shred of justification on my part, in spite of also feeling like a damn fool … for ‘having a crush’ … I simply said I had a meaningful experience, tho if there is some one specific point you can say was the experience, I don’t know what it was…. I was in love with myself, I suppose. I had been granted a gift.

  Nancy continued her liberation manifesto,

  This whole experience was not oriented to any one personal relationship. I knew that all the things that generally hold one back DON’T MATTER, that one just goes on being oneself totally (wholly or whorely as the case may be). It doesn’t matter if your 34 and look like dishwater—you just go ahead and do what you feel…. I felt grateful to L. for having such a grand effect on me – party-drink-smooching-wise, but it stopped there.