by Peter Byrne
That the multiverse is a giant superposition embracing branching worlds, some classical, some not, was a key feature of Everett’s theory—and this important feature was not clearly explained in either version of his dissertation. It is relevant to why he always viewed the uncountably infinite branches as “equally real.”
Everett explained to Lévy-Leblond:
I have not done further work in this area since the original paper in 1955 (not published in its entirety until 1973, as the ‘Many-Worlds Interpretation etc.’). This, of course, was not my title as I was pleased to have the paper published in any form anyone chose to do it in! I, in effect, had washed my hands of the whole affair in 1956.
The hand-washing claim was, as we have seen, an exaggeration. Subsequent to 1956, he had made some substantial efforts to explain his theory, and he had monitored its trajectory. He apparently edited the section on probability in the long thesis prior to publication. But even Everett’s closest friends were unaware how much he cared about the fate of his theory because he cultivated the appearance of not caring about the most significant achievement of his life.
Wheeler, on the other hand, was scrubbing his hands like mad.
Great smoky dragons
After Wheeler retired from Princeton and moved to Austin, Texas in 1976 to teach and research physics at the University of Texas alongside DeWitt, one of the first papers he wrote was “Bohr’s ‘Phenomenon’ and ‘Law Without Law.’” In successive years, he wrote several papers called “Law Without Law,” as he shed his Everettian baggage and reaffirmed his allegiance to the Copenhagen interpretation, adding a dose of Wignerian idealism. In his pantheon of quantum heroes, he replaced Everett with Rosenfeld.23 And he waxed poetic about his late mentor’s philosophical commitment to indeterminism:
The great smoky dragon, Bohr’s phenomenon, has its tail sharply localized at the point of entry to the apparatus. Its teeth are sharply localized where it bites the grain of photographic emulsion. In between it is utterly cloud-like, localized neither in space nor in time…. The central point of quantum theory can be put into a single, simple sentence. ‘No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered (‘observed,’ ‘indelibly recorded’) phenomenon.’ … We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening.24
Everett, of course, thought that quantum interactions left indelible traces in the environments (including, but not limited to observer brain states) of respective branches; and that physical change was not dependent upon consciousness and human participation, quite the opposite.
In 1979, Wheeler explicitly disposed of the many worlds interpretation, as well as the “branching histories” approach he had favored a few years before.25 He questioned any and all assumptions of a deterministic universe. Those who agree with Laplace, said Wheeler, may claim: “The Universe is a machine. No, we have to tell him: that is a cracked paradigm.”
And no paradigm was as cracked as Everett’s:
Imaginative Everett’s thesis is, and instructive, we agree. We once subscribed to it. In retrospect, however, it looks like the wrong track. First, this formulation of quantum mechanics denigrates the quantum. It denies from the start that the quantum character of Nature is any clue to the plan of physics. Take this Hamiltonian26 for the world, that Hamiltonian, or any other Hamiltonian, this formulation says. I am in principle too lordly to care which, or why there should be any Hamiltonian at all. You give me whatever world you please, and in return I give you back many worlds. Don’t look to me for help in understanding this universe.
Second, its infinitely many unobservable worlds make a heavy load of metaphysical baggage.27
In 1983, a year after Everett’s death, Wheeler and Wojciech Zurek published a comprehensive collection of the all-time great papers in quantum measurement theory, among them Everett’s short thesis. The “Law Without Law” essay, in which Wheeler had dismissed the many worlds theory as “metaphysical baggage,” was also included: but he excised his negative references to Everett, replacing them with eliding dots.28 It might have been hard to explain, after all, why he was including Everett’s paper in a collection of the best foundational ideas in the history of quantum theory, when he totally disbelieved it. Or, perhaps, he had simply changed his mind again.29
BOOK 11
AMERICAN TRAGEDY
36 The Final Years
However unreasonable or immoral an action may be, man has an insuperable urge to rationalize it, that is, to prove to himself and to others that his action is determined by reason, common sense, or at least conventional morality. He has little difficulty in acting irrationally, but it is almost impossible for him not to give his action the appearance of reasonable motivation.
Erich Fromm, 19551
Everettian blues2
Listening to Everett’s sing-songy voice on the only known tape recording of him gives one a feel for his crackling energy when inebriated. He sounds like a man who wants to enjoy the good life with friends; but he also he sounds a bit fey, a bit self-deprecating, a bit sad. In truth, he was not wont to show his sadness, or any other emotion, to friends and colleagues. He projected the attitude of a cynical man of rare intelligence who viewed life as a game in which smart people minimized the worst that could happen. He seemed largely indifferent to the feelings of others. Indeed, he seemed indifferent to the fate of his many worlds theory, as he seldom spoke of it.
Susanne Misner was more observant. She remembers her friend of a quarter century as a clown laughing to hide tears.
His wife and children knew that Everett: the sad, uncommunicative alcoholic napping on the living room couch after dinner, snoring loudly as the television blared, waking to write computer code at the dinner table, chain smoking and drinking into the wee hours while the family slept.
Absorbed by her inner life, Nancy was an indifferent house-keeper. The house reeked of tobacco smoke; newspapers and magazines were stacked all over. The “fallout shelter” in the basement was gradually taken over by batch-numbered bottles of homemade wine jokingly labeled “DP” for Dom Perignon (it was barely drinkable). After Everett harvested his backyard grapes in the autumn, he squashed them in garbage cans in the kitchen—permeating the house with the pungent smell of fermentation.
Everett making wine in kitchen, circa 1976.
For a while his hobby was CB-radio. He kept a unit in the kitchen, and another in his used Cadillac, regularly chatting with redneck trucker friends, occasionally inviting them over for beer and barbecue. His handle was Mad Scientist, and he looked the part, with his goatee and his freakishly long, curled fingernails. In a nod to self-preservation, he smoked his Kent cigarettes through a long plastic filter.
Nancy was allowed into his world to the extent she joined his pursuit of fine, fatty, French food, washed down with copious amounts of premium alcohol, followed by occasional bouts of sport sex. She was widely viewed by his associates as self-effacing, childlike, an odd match for the scientist. But she was loyal to him, and he to her, in his own way. And she was in charge of the children.
Unlike the stereotypical neighborhood Dad, Everett did not coach sports or take the kids on outings—except once he took Mark to a circus. In vain, the children craved attention from their remote, self-absorbed father. Nancy was a constant presence, ready to give them rides and feed them. But Liz and Mark were largely unsupervised—allowed to drink, smoke dope, and have sex with friends at home. They were not chastised or put on restriction or given the limits that children need to learn who they are. They were often in hot water with teachers, neighbors, cops. By her late teens, Liz was a full-blown mess. Manic-depressive, she turned to sex, alcohol, and a variety of drugs—from LSD and pot to cocaine and heroin—to kill the pain of being alive. It was not uncommon for her to drink a beer for breakfast. Mark, six years younger, revered his sister, even as she spun out of control. Downstairs in the basement, he constantly banged his drum set, filling the house with percussive demands, and, even then,
his parents left him to his own devices.
Reisler met Everett when he applied for a job at Lambda in 1970. He shyly inquired of Reisler, who holds a PhD from Yale University in foundations of quantum mechanics, if he’d ever heard of the relative states theory? Reisler thought, “Oh my God, you are that Everett, the crazy one.” He quietly acknowledged that he was aware of the interpretation. And that was the last time they spoke about quantum mechanics. Even when Everett returned from Austin he did not mention the trip to Reisler.
Reisler sums up: “Hugh was a Renaissance man. It is a mistake to view him only as a physicist or operations researcher; he was more than that, he was a problem solver. And a hedonist.” Reisler, a non-smoker, non-drinker and an outdoorsman, was, in terms of healthy lifestyle, a world apart from his pallid-faced partner.3
When Everett and Reisler started DBS, they agreed that Everett would tend to the science, and Reisler would manage the business. To Everett’s dismay, Reisler insisted that they not procure prostitutes for clients. Their clients were mostly officials at federal agencies, including the departments of Health, Education, and Welfare, and Justice. They also had a lucrative subcontract with AMS to optimize ship maintenance for the Navy. For a while, DBS was closely aligned with AMS, which owned 25 percent of the company. The AMS founders were reluctant to let Everett stray too far out of sight, so they kept him on a financial tether, and lunched with him regularly, picking his brain.
DBS’s bread and butter was overseeing affirmative action laws for federal agencies. Everett designed computer programs to ferret out patterns of discrimination. His forte was inventing algorithms to sort huge quantities of data while checking for computing errors. Reisler delivered expert testimony on behalf of agencies suing corporations and local governments for race, disability, and gender discrimination. At its height, the privately owned company reached $1.25 million in sales and kept a score of employees. But the bulk of DBS’s work was nowhere near as interesting or as demanding as military operations research, and Everett quickly became bored. With a girlfriend, Georgia Bailey, he started a travel agency, giving her a $10,000 ownership stake in the firm, which she was to manage.
Everett and Donald Reisler, circa 1979.
On a yellow legal pad he tested a succession of names for the company: Many Worlds, Black Hole, Crossroads, Trantor-Terminus, Quantum Quality, Green Knight, Stoned Stranger, Mighty Mouse, Virgin Territory. He settled on Key Travel.
It was never a money-maker, quite the contrary, but it did enable him to get discounts on the week-long ocean cruises he took at every opportunity. He loved to travel first-class, whether by air or water. But family vacations were often spent at a modest beach house designed and built by his father in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
He also bought a condo on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. Friends recount that Nancy did not mind when her husband invited “other” women along on their Caribbean adventures. He was always on the make, shamelessly slipping his hand under the dinner table onto the thighs of wives of his friends; but he did not hold a grudge when his advances were rejected (and they were not always rejected).
He loved playing the big spender, picking up dinner tabs with $100 bills, flipping Krugerrands in the air to startle friends with the flash of gold (he kept about $20,000 worth of gold medallions in a safety deposit box).
He played poker for modest stakes and enjoyed the art of bluffing.
In the late 1970s, Everett became enamored of mini-computers. He bought a Tandy-Radio Shack TRS-80 and programmed it to run spreadsheets for Key Travel. His software designs were cutting edge, testing the calculational limits of the desktop computers. Reisler says Everett’s programs might have made bundles of money if he had taken the time to develop and market them, but he was always moving on to the next iteration. He fed his programming addiction by buying $35,000 in personal computer equipment, an expense, which, as it turned out, he could ill afford.
In the late 1970s, Everett financed the start-up of an artificial intelligence software development company with a former DBS data-programmer, Elaine Tsiang. They named it Monowave (after Mark’s garage band of that day). Tsiang had earned her doctorate in physics at North Carolina, studying with DeWitt. After graduation, she had trouble finding a job in physics—being female, and of Chinese descent. Serendipitously, she applied for a programmer position at DBS, only to learn, from Everett’s careful question, that he was that Hugh Everett III. Subsequently, she became very close to him and Nancy, once going on a Caribbean cruise with them, (and being mistaken by a passenger for their daughter).4
Tsiang recalls, “Hugh liked to espouse an extreme form of solipsism as part of his constant, light-hearted one-upmanship. Although he took pains to distance his theory proper from any theory of mind or consciousness, obviously we all owed our existence relative to the world he had brought into being.”
Being Everett’s business partner was not easy: A furiously penciled note that he left behind castigates Tsiang for not taking advantage of tax loopholes. It shows how contemptuous and angry he could be with colleagues who made minor mistakes.
Everett considered himself a libertarian, says Tsiang: “Everything should be allowed, except physical force. People should be allowed to sell themselves into slavery, if they so chose, or can be persuaded.” He admired Machiavelli, she says, for his “penetrating theory of political behavior, and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins for his selfish gene theory.”5
Another former DBS programmer, Keith Lynch, says Everett liked to talk about libertarianism and, also, logical paradoxes. Lynch was an amateur physicist, so Everett gave him a paperback copy of his many worlds book. Lynch says that he and Everett once talked about “quantum suicide,” the proposition that it makes sense for a believer in the many worlds interpretation to play high stakes Russian Roulette as, in some universe, some version of you is bound to win.6 It is unlikely, however, that Everett subscribed to this view, as the only sure thing it guarantees is that the majority of your copies will die, hardly a rational goal.
Everett kept his life compartmentalized—his family knew next to nothing about his work, his colleagues knew little or nothing about his family. His friends were largely unaware that he was drinking and smoking himself to death. But Nancy was keenly aware that both her daughter and husband were afflicted by alcoholism. She researched the disease, giving them both Alcoholic Anonymous books and pamphlets. But, between Everett’s drinking and smoking and eating raw meat and fatty foods and refusing to see a doctor for any reason, “he kind of orchestrated his demise,” she later wrote to a friend. Everett often joked that layering itself with cholesterol was the heart’s way of protecting itself,7 and there is some truth in that, but slathering on too much of the wrong kind of cholesterol proved to be fatal to him.
End of days
Pretty, blonde, outwardly vivacious, inwardly despairing, Liz bounced in and out of the McLean residence over the years. She partied from dusk to dawn. When she was 16, she shacked up for a while with a man twice her age. She gained and lost boyfriends, she gained and lost jobs. In 1979, she moved to Hawaii to live with her army friend from Austin, a loser who lived off her and her family. Worried about their unstable daughter, Hugh and Nancy shipped her a used Mazda. They paid her credit card charges. They sent a constant stream of checks to cover the newest emergency: crashed vehicles, dental work, lost apartment rent, no money for food. They flew her home for a Christmas celebration and she partied in a drunken, stoned blackout for days, not even remembering how she eventually got back to Honolulu. Eventually, her boyfriend became a fundamentalist Christian and they broke up. She returned to McLean and partied harder, because that was all she knew how to do.
Liz, circa 1977.
After Colonel Everett retired from active duty in the army with a sizeable pension in 1958, he and Sara embarked upon a world tour for more than a year. Returning, they purchased a mansion called The Knoll in rural Berryville, Virginia, filling it with such rococo furnishings as
dining room chairs with Cupid heads. The colonel earned a credential as fallout shelter engineer, and is thought by family members to have worked on Site R inside Raven Rock Mountain in Pennsylvania, the hardened command bunker into which U.S. government leaders would retreat in time of nuclear war.8 He enjoyed a long retirement, and died in 1980 after a struggle with lung cancer and diabetes. In many ways, Everett emulated his father—the compulsive photography, the excessive drinking, the love of smoking and women, the service to militarism. Hugh Jr. had been his son’s anchor ever since Katharine walked away. And when he died, so did Everett’s model for living.9
There were some happy moments in Mclean: Mark remembers that for his father’s 51st birthday, Liz cooked up a surprise.
She asked him to talk to a friend of hers who was interested in learning about computers. He put wine and cheese out on the dining room table. The friend came over and he was very charming and outgoing with her, and then she suddenly ripped off her dress revealing a Wonder Woman outfit and sang Happy Birthday to him. Liz had hired her! I can still see the look on his face when he realized he’d been had. His face turned red, and then he laughed and had a great time with it. Of course, the shock might not of helped his heart.10