by Peter Byrne
inflexibility of, 122–23
Institute for Defense Analyses and, 212
JASON and, 128
as lobbyist, 213–14
many worlds theory and, 132 (see also many worlds theory)
marriage of, 121
missile gap and, 213–14
“The Nature of Time” conference and, 266–67
as Nazi sympathizer, 122–23
as non-smoker, 119
nuclear war and, 123–25
Office of Naval Research and, 126–27
operations research and, 128
persecution of Bohm and, 124
pictures of, 118f, 120f, 350f
politics of, 121–23, 130
Princeton and, 121, 126–27
publicly disowns Everett, 326–33
Rosenfeld and, 332
Santa Fe Institute and, 370–72
schooling of, 119–21
sharing of nuclear information and, 123–24
Shenstone and, 167
sociobiology and, 298
Stern and, 165–66
Strasbourg conference and, 329–31
Trieste symposium and, 328–29
Tuesday ruminations of, 322–25
University of Texas and, 321–23, 331–32
Whirlwind analog computer system, 190
White House, 3
“Who’s Who in the East”, 19–20
Wiener, Norbert, 7, 109
cybernetics and, 37, 39, 41, 72–73
many worlds theory and, 144, 149, 169, 172–73
nuclear warfare and, 124, 199
Wigner, Eugene, 81, 101, 104–5, 329
Atomic Scientists group and, 124
collapse theory and, 258
Conference on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics and, 252–53, 258–59
Copenhagen interpretation and, 113–14
decoherence theory and, 366
DeWitt and, 307–8
nuclear weapons research and, 128
role of consciousness and, 145–46
Rosenfeld and, 249–51
Strasbourg conference and, 330
Trieste symposium and, 328
Wigner’s friend, 114, 146n6, 301n2, 394
Willis, Ken, 278, 280
Wilson, Edward O., 298
Wilson, Fred, 30
Wilson cloud chamber, 99–100, 363
“Winning Mortgage” (Everett program), 346–47
Wohlstetter, Albert, 235
Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 11
World War I, 199
World War II, 8, 10, 15, 20–21, 46, 58, 122–23
Xavier University, 251–61, 301
Yang, 328
Year of Miracles (1905), 93
York, Herbert F., 198
Young, Thomas, 92, 302
Zeh, Dieter, 102, 261, 364–66, 368–70
zero-sum game, 61–63
Zubaretsky, Marco Stefanovitch, 48–50
Zukov, Gary, 310
Zurek, Wojciech H., 10, 131, 319, 332, 366–70
1 Wheeler, J. A. (1973). 245. Wheeler often wrote this slogan on his classroom chalk boards.
2 FBI. (1971).
3 Wheeler to Everett, 10/30/57.
4 Jammer, M. (1974). 509.
5 DeWitt, B. S. (1970). 161.
6 See Epilogue for claims that there may be physical evidence for multiple universes in the cosmic microwave background radiation.
1 Zurek, W. H. (1998).
2 “A Message to Intellectuals,” in Einstein, A. (1954). 149–150.
3 Information in this section is from interviews with members of the extended Everett family and documents in the basement archives. For instance, in a September 23, 1959 letter to Hugh Jr. and Sara, who were on a world cruise, Nancy wrote that Ma Maw “has always felt that she has missed out on life somewhere—and not being able to blame herself—takes it out on those closest.”
4 Washington Post, 1/8/55; according to Everett, Jr.’s high school yearbook in 1920, “Hugh is a marksman. He is also a handsome lady-killer.”
5 Everett, Jr. to Thrift, 10/11/35, basement.
6 Everett, M. (2008). 13.
7 After the war, a beautiful Sicilian woman that Colonel Everett had befriended during the occupation of Sicily wrote to him thanking him and Sarah for some dresses they had sent to her, and requesting an overcoat for her father. The letter was intimate, without revealing the exact nature of their relationship. She sent a photo of herself and her teenage daughter and requested a picture of the Colonel’s son, who “must be a big boy by now.” Larregsoffore to Everett, Jr., 2/14/48.
1 Fromm, E. (1955). 39.
2 KK resume, basement; Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature annual editions.
3 After Katharine died, Everett gave a collection of her published poems about time and space to her alma mater, George Washington University, which republished them in the Winter 1965 issue of its alumni magazine, including “Unified Field.”
4 Einstein, A. (1954). 46-47.
1 Written as a class assignment, circa 1940, typed by Katharine (whose pacifist politics probably influenced her son’s poem), basement.
2 His friends thought that Sarah was his birth mother; he never once mentioned Katharine to them.
3 Mohr, Wilson interviews with author, 2008.
4 Wilson confirmed that Everett was a Hubbard fan.
5 Nancy to Mark, 4/26/96.
6 Reisler, Clifford interviews.
7 Clifford interview; the test subject was, according to Clifford, Misner, who worked at WSEG one summer.
8 A tautology is an abstract, self-referential logical statement that does not have to conform to physical reality.
9 Thanks to Jeffrey A. Barrett and Simon Saunders for explicating the “existence scrap.” Barrett comments, “Everett may have heard this argument from someone else since there are similar reconstructions of the ontological argument that predate Everett. It is quite impressive if he got this himself.” Barrett, private communication, 2009.
10 Everett, Jr. cut short his tour of duty in Europe as a post quartermaster in Germany due to a run in with an inspector general. An undercover investigator for the IG found a range of improprieties with contracts and funding for salvage operations under Everett, Jr.’s command. Claiming that the IG’s findings were “fly-specking on minutia,” Everett asked to be transferred back to the states a year before he was due back because he believed the IG was out to get him and that his inspectors were “hatchets” and “rats.” Everett, Jr. was very well-connected at the Pentagon and he was allowed to return to an important position. Letters March–May, 1952, Everett, Jr. to commanding officers.
11 Ghamari-Tabrizi, S. (2000).
12 Phrase coined by physicist Rolf W. Landauer of IBM.
13 Kuhn, H. Private communication. 2008. Boone to Taylor, April 17, 1953.
14 As Jessica Wang points out in American Science in an Age of Anxiety, “[W]ith the budgetary stresses of the Korean War, the NSF could only attain significant funding by selling Congress on the importance of basic research for defense purposes. The NSF’s educational programs, even before the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, owed much to Cold War concerns about the supply of scientific and technical personnel.” Wang, J. (1999). 261.
15 Wiener, N. (1948). 0–11.
16 Ibid. 160.
1 Forrest and Wright’s “Stranger in Paradise” was one of Nancy’s favorite songs.
2 Ghamari-Tabrizi, S. (2005). 99.
3 Edwards, P. N. (1996). 90. The Corps program was terminated in 1957.
4 On June 19, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted for passing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union, so either Nancy’s use of the present tense is a slip, or she had missed the news of their execution.
1 Schrödinger, E. (1952). 110.
2 Information about the graduate college is from Everett’s basement files and interviews with his classmates.
3 Pais, A. (1982). 453. Written in a 1933 le
tter to Queen Elizabeth of Belgium.
4 Institute for Advanced Study. (1954); Edwards, P. N. (1996). 61; Wheeler, J. A. and Ford, K. (1998). 209. RAND is a contraction of “research and development.” It was founded by Douglas Aircraft Company a few weeks after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It became a separate non-profit firm in 1948 and remains a major player in national security contracting.
5 LANL History.
6 DeWitt, C. M. and Wheeler, J. A. (1968). x.
7 Bird, K. and Sherwin, M. J. (2005). 541.
8 Mark Everett interviewed the men during the filming of Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives.
9 Entropy is a measure of disorder in the energy of a closed system.
10 “Classical” physics is the mechanics based upon the paradigmatic theories of Newton and Maxwell that ruled science until quantum mechanics and relativity were discovered at the turn of the 20th century, rendering the previous paradigm “classical.”
11 Momentum is mass times velocity; according to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, position and momentum are a unity of opposites. Increasing the definiteness of one quality means that the other quality becomes less definite.
1 Savage, L. J. (1954). 6–59.
2 von Neumann, J. and Morgenstern, O. (2004). 31.
3 Luce, D. R. and Raffia, H. (1957). 50.
4 To greatly simplify how choices can be quantified: A 30 percent outcome of event A multiplied by a utility of 10 would be 300; a 40 percent outcome of event B multiplied by a utility of 2 would be 140.
5 RAND played a large role in Everett’s career. He was a frequent visitor to its headquarters in Santa Monica, California.
6 Schelling, T. (1984). 214–15.
7 Oddly, taking risks is often more fun than not.
8 Rapoport, A. (1964). 72.
9 Ibid. 72.
10 Ibid. 102.
11 Ibid. 75; In other words, rationality is a (sometimes) quantifiable quality. Most human beings would agree that it is not a rational act to cross the street in front of a speeding bus, or to poison the water supply in search of short term profit, or to depend on fossil fuels, etc. But people in power who do obviously irrational things are often compelled to rationalize these actions by falling back on agendized utility values and probability statements. Of course, if you start with an irrational premise, e.g. “nuclear war is a rational option,” no amount of utilitarian quantification can, believably, turn it into its opposite. Context is everyting.
12 Kuhn interview, Feb. 2008.
13 In 1950, Nash invented his Nobel Prize-winning theory of “equilibrium points” in games, which has many socio-economic applications. And RAND’s Shapley is most remembered for the “Shapley value,” which measures distributions of political power inside groups and coalitions.
14 Kuhn interview, Feb 2008.
15 Everett, H III. (1957A). 74.
16 Ibid. 76.
1 Fromm, E. (1955). 137.
2 Although it was not unreasonable to have raced Hitler for an atom bomb during World War Two, after Nazi Germany was defeated by conventional forces in 1944, that reason for pursuing it ceased to exist. Many Manhattan Project scientists urged Truman to refrain from using the new weapon, correctly observing that Japanese militarism was exhausted and at the point of surrender. As they realized, dropping The Bomb on two cities quickly converted a non-zero sum game into zero sum and set a precedent for future conflict.
3 Operations researchers often claim that MAD was rational because it forced the Soviet Union to its knees in 1989, ending the Cold War. This is a dubious argument that will be taken up in subsequent chapters which examine the true risks that were run by both sides. MAD can be viewed as a form of cooperation between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. military brass and civilian hawks whose careers were mutually advanced by the Cold War.
4 Wilson, D. S. & Wilson, E. O. (2007). A consistent measure of rationality, it seems, cannot be universally quantified. It should be safe to say, however, that the continued survival of the human species should be a commonly shared utility value amongst genuinely rational humans. As Everett’s colleague, George Pugh, pointed out in his 1977 book The Biological Origin of Human Values, the imperative of species survival is encoded in our genes and informs our core values.
5 Rapoport, A. (1964). 125.
1 DeWitt, B. and Graham, N. eds. (1973). 134–136.
2 Eisenhower’s farewell address to the American people, January 17, 1961.
3 Helmer, O. (1957).
4 Wiener, N. (1948). 159.
5 Morgenstern, O. (1957).
6 Poundstone, W. (1992). 143.
7 Ford, private communication, 2009.
8 Poundstone, W. (1992). 180.
9 Ibid. 259–260.
10 Ibid. (1992). 179.
11 Ibid. (1992). 180.
12 von Neumann, J. & Morgenstern, O. (2004). x.
13 Kuhn interview, 2008; McDonald, J. “A Theory of Strategy,” in von Neumann, J. & Morgenstern, O. (2004). 710.
14 Kuhn interview, 2008.
15 Kuhn interview, 2008.
16 Everett, H, III. (1962). 17. Everett’s method proceeds by connecting a series of discrete steps, unlike methods based on continuums, which could end up projecting unrealistic unit numbers, such as 7.1984 missiles each carrying 1.666 warheads.
17 Ibid. 17–18.
1 Feynman, R. et al. (1965). 1–10.
2 Realism holds that there is an objective, physical reality underlying phenomena.
3 Princeton enrolled its first female graduate student, Sabra Follett Meserve, as a Ph.D. candidate in Turkish history in 1961. Princeton Alumni Weekly, 3/12/03.
4 In September, 1954, Everett’s hometown newspaper, the Alexandria Gazette, ran a photograph of him in a gown, smoking a cigarette, welcoming the “Danish savant,” Niels Bohr, to a sojourn in Princeton. During the summer break, Everett had, according to the caption, “[given] a lecture on a special interest of his called ‘Game Theory,’ a kind of scientific guessing that has military implications.”
5 “‘I embarked on [a project] to revise quantum theory,’ Nash said…. It was this attempt that Nash would blame … for triggering his mental illness—calling his attempt to resolve the contradictions in quantum theory, on which he had embarked in the summer of 1957, ‘possibly overreaching and psychologically destabilizing.’” Nasar, S. (1998). 221.
6 Schrödinger, E. (1952). 115.
7 Technically, the positive value of the wave function is squared to determine the probability. More about this later.
8 See: Howard, D. (2004). 669–682 and Camilleri, K. (2009). 25–57.
9 DeWitt, B. and Graham, N. eds. (1973). 110.
10 Bohr’s written accounts of complementarity are famously vague, but, in conjunction with Werner von Heisenberg, Pauli, and others the term “Copenhagen interpretation” emerged in public discourse. By the 1950s, it provided a convenient target for those upset by the status quo (such as Everett or Bohm). As a kind of catch-all interpretation of quantum mechanics it reflects several major ideas, not all of which were overtly agreed to by Bohr. Mara Beller remarks, “The Copenhagen philosophy can thus be seen as a contingent composite of different philosophical strands, the public face on a hidden web of constantly shifting differences among its founders.” Beller, M. (1999). 173.
11 Petersen, A. (1963); see also Bohr, N. (1934). 7–10.
12 Pais, A. (1991). 502.
13 Wheeler, J.A. and Ford, K. (1998). 126.
14 Pais, A. (1991). 435. In 1956, Bohr noted, “The experimental conditions can be varied in many ways, but the point is that in each case we must be able to communicate to others what we have done and what we have learned, and that therefore the functioning of the measuring instruments must be described within the framework of classical physical ideas. As all measurements thus concern bodies sufficiently heavy to permit the quantum to be neglected in their description, there is, strictly speaking, no observational problem in atomic physics.” Bohr, N. (1956).
1
5 French, A. P. and Kennedy, P. J. eds. (1985). 305. In 1934, Bohr wrote: “In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of phenomena but only to track down as far as possible the relations between the multifold aspects of our experience.” Bohr, N. (1934) 18.