by Peter Byrne
32 According to a telegram and a letter in the basement archive, in late July, Everett told the RMP editor that his original corrections of the proof had been “lost in the mails.” With days, maybe hours to spare before the deadline, Everett gave the editor a second copy, with the “split” footnote inserted in ink. Due to time constraints, it is almost certain that Wheeler did not know the footnote had been added.
33 Everett, H III. (1957) in DeWitt, B. and Graham, N. eds. (1973). 146–147.
1 Arnold interview, 2007.
2 “Principle of Research,” in Einstein, A. (1954). 222.
3 Whereas gravity acts locally, prohibiting action at a distance, quantum entanglement acts nonlocally. And the space-time of general relativity is “curved,” whereas quantum mechanics demands a “flat” coordinate system. In general relativity, the universe divides into many different observational frames of reference. What you see depends on how fast you are traveling relative to other frames. Not so in quantum mechanics, which applies a single frame of reference to the whole universe.
4 Other organizers included Freeman Dyson of the Institute of Advanced Study, Frederick Belinfante of Purdue University, and Peter Bergmann of Syracuse University. It was funded by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics.
5 DeWitt, B. S. (2008).
6 Misner, C. (1957).
7 DeWitt, C. M. (1957). 18. Note that some of the transcript is not composed of direct quotes but is a summary of what was said, and that not all of the statements in the transcript were directly approved by the participants, although there is no reason to doubt accuracy; see also Dewitt-Morette, C. (2009).
8 More specifically, he suggested a way of using path integrals to quantize the gravitational field. By quantization he meant generating algorithms to extract quantum numbers from continuous fields of wavy energy. Quantum numbers describe the energy of specific particles, e.g. the energy of an electron orbiting at a certain distance from an atomic nucleus. Wave functions contain this information.
9 Misner private communication, 5/6/2008, italics added.
10 DeWitt, C. M. (1957). 82.
11 Ibid. 83.
12 He called his conjectures “electromagnetism without electromagnetism,” and “mass without mass.” Prompting Thomas Gold of Cornell University to crack wise that he was proposing, “Answers without answers.” Ibid. 131.
13 DeWitt, C. M. (1957). 137; see also Zeh, D. (2008), which analyzes this conference.
14 Ibid., 139–140.
15 “This is a strong argument in favor of Everett’s work,” said Misner. Private communication, 4/27/09.
16 DeWitt, C. M. (1957). 150.
17 Ibid., 149.
18 Ibid., 149.
19 See: Misner, C. (1969).
20 Misner interview, 2007.
21 Ibid.
22 Misner private communication, 4/28/09.
1 Einstein, A., (1954). “The Pursuit of Peace.” 160.
2 Wheeler to Everett-1, 5/22/56.
3 Everett, Katharine Kennedy to Hugh Everett III, 5/11/56.
4 WSEG job description, basement.
5 Anderson, S. E. Lt. Gen. USAF to Local Board Number 42, 7/18/56.
6 NGE diaries, late 1980s.
7 Morse, P. (1977). 182.
8 Edwards, P. N. (1996). 75–111.
9 Edwards, P. N. (1996). 99–109.
10 WSEG/Ponturo, J. (1979). 93.
11 IDA was governed by the presidents of MIT, Case Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and Tulane University. Seven more universities, including Princeton, eventually joined IDA. The non-profit’s first president was not a scientist—it was retired Air Force general, James McCormack, Jr. The general and his successors (usually retired generals) owed their primary allegiance to a military service.
12 WSEG/Ponturo, J. (1979). 103, 181.
13 Shurkin, J. N. (2006). 191.
14 WSEG/Ponturo, J. (1979). 151.
15 IDA memo, 3/5/63, basement.
16 WSEG/Ponturo, J. (1979). 204, 280.
17 In 1958, the secret ARGUS bomb tests over the South Atlantic revealed that what later became known as the “electro-magnetic pulse” could fry the wiring of unprotected weapons and communications systems. This was to be a major problem for designing a missile defense system based on exploding incoming missiles with small fission bombs, as the resultant pulses could destroy the defense system itself.
18 WSEG/Ponturo, J. (1979). 167.
19 Kaplan, F. (1983). 127–152.
20 Ball, D. (1980). 6.
21 Kaplan, F. (1983). 145.
22 Reisler interview, 2006.
23 Dickson, P. (2001). 99.
24 Ibid. 224.
25 Ibid. 206.
1 Schrödinger, E. (1935A). 137.
2 Kaplan, F. (1983). 133–134.
3 Fryklund, R. (1962). 71.
4 Mark Everett, private communication, 2009.
5 Ghamari-Tabrizi, S. (2005). 285–286.
6 Kahn, H. (1960). 93.
7 Interviews with Gary Lucas, 2008, Ken Willis, 2007.
8 Kahn, H. and Mann, I. (1957A). 38.
9 Ibid. 28.
10 Kahn, H. and Mann, I. (1957). 66.
11 Ibid. 123.
12 Ibid. 157–161. Italics added.
13 Ghamari-Tabrizi, S. (2005). 184.
14 In 1958, York was appointed Director of Defense Research and Engineering in the defense department, overseeing advanced weapons research. He later wrote a book critical of the nuclear arms race, Race to Oblivion. York, H. (1970).
15 Ghamari-Tabrizi, S. (2005). 193.
16 “Looking Glass” was the code name for the aircraft from which U.S. presidents were slated to run a nuclear war. Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice in Wonderland is called Through the Looking Glass.
17 Sakharov, A. (1990). 96–97.
18 Edward Teller and Wheeler “fathered” the American hydrogen bomb.
19 Sakharov, A. (1990). 100.
20 Ibid. 116.
21 Ibid. 131.
22 Ibid. 46.
23 Ibid. 194, 204.
24 Edwards, P. N. (1996). 2.
25 Ibid. 12–14.
1 Fromm, E. (1955). 87.
2 Now in his eighties and retired, Pugh had a long career in operations research in both the private and public sectors. In 1977, he published an important book in evolutionary biology, The Biological Origin of Human Values. In 2007, the International Astronomical Association named an asteroid for Pugh in honor of his work on the Gravity B Probe, a satellite-based mission designed to measure space-time curvature affected by the Earth and, thereby, confirm Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Pugh proposed the mission in 1959, while at WSEG, and the probe was finally launched in 2004. The following year, Pugh wrote a memoir recounting his WSEG days, which is available at the Niels Bohr Archive at the American Institute of Physics.
3 Everett, H. III and Pugh, G. E. (1958). 17.
4 Ibid. 29; In 1956, the B-52 bomber force was about 1,600, each airplane capable of carrying about 40 megatons for a total delivery of 64,000 megatons. This figure did not count bombing by ballistic missile, a capability which was just getting off the drawing boards. Everett and Pugh calculated that the kill ratio of 2000 megatons on an unsheltered population was 22 percent, rising to 40 percent at 2,500 megatons, 80 percent at 8,000 megatons, 95 percent at 10,000 megatons; and mass extinction at 20,000 megatons. But a well-sheltered population was killed at about half that rate, reaching 95 percent dead at 50,000 megatons.
5 Ibid. 31.
6 Pugh, G. E. (2005). 16.
7 Ibid. 17.
8 Everett, H. III and Pugh, G. (1959).
9 Pauling, L. (1963). After the fallout study was published, NATO countries asked WSEG to study the effect of fallout on Europe from U.S. bombs dropped on the U.S.S.R. According to Pugh, the prevailing winds would usually, but not always, carry the fallout away f
rom the NATO countries. Pugh, G. E. (2005). 44.
10 Herken, G. (1987). 38.
11 Pugh, G. E. (2005). 21–22.
12 At other times and places, as duly noted, Everett expressed even firmer support for the physical reality of his worlds.
13 Pugh, G. E. (2005). 22.
14 Basement papers.
15 Pugh, G. E. (2005). 23; see: Pugh, G. E. (1977).
16 Pugh, G. E. (2005). 23.
1 Speech at Columbia University, quoted in Fromm, E. (1955). 102.
2 NGE files, basement.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ponturo, J. (1979). 190. IDA also administered the newly formed Advanced Research Projects Agency, which was charged with designing futuristic weapons, high-tech surveillance systems, and counter-insurgency tactics for fighting guerilla armies waging national liberation struggles.
6 U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment. (1995). 2.
7 Aaserud, F. (1995). 213, 222.
8 Everett, H III files, basement.
9 Lambda spreadsheet, basement.
10 Pugh, G. E. (2005). 16.
11 Pugh, G. E. (2005). 32.
12 Wheeler to Everett, circa 1958.
13 Wheeler to Everett with mimeographed enclosure, circa 1958, basement.
14 Ball, D. (1980). 6–8.
15 Wheeler to Everett, 10/30/57.
16 Ibid.
17 Siegel to Everett, 4/16/59.
1 Petersen, A. (1968). 188.
2 Fock, V. A. (1957). 1.
3 The positivists of the “Vienna Circle” asserted that we can only understand the world through verification of experimental result. It is meaningless to ask questions about an underlying reality, they said.
4 Fock, V. A. (1957). 2–3.
5 Petersen, A. (1963).
6 Fock, V. A. (1957). 3.
7 Beller references correspondence between Bohr and Fock during 1957 showing that their struggle was more intense than Fock indicates in “The Journey to Copenhagen.” In particular, “Both Fock and Born were amazed by Bohr’s rejection of quantum concepts and frustrated with his resignation from the attempt to comprehend the underlying quantum reality.” Beller, M. (1999). 183. See also Camilleri, K. (2009) on how Fock tried to reconcile Bohr’s philosophy with materialism.
8 What follows in this account is from an interview with Charles and Susanne Misner in 2004.
9 Lucas interview, 2008.
10 Lasden interview, 2008.
1 Fryklund, R. (1962). ix.
2 Report 50 was composed of 10 major “enclosures,” each with multiple volumes and appendixes. Of the five publicly available sections of the enclosures, two are concerned with how global economics and politics interact with the U.S.’s evolving nuclear strategy. Three are of a technical nature, concerning the development of specific weapons systems, and they are severely redacted.
3 Pugh, G. E. (2005). 35. Incidentally, the report must have held a certain nightmare fascination for Everett as, according to his universal wave function model, global nuclear war was bound to occur in some universes. It is interesting to speculate in an “anthropic” sense that if nuclear holocaust was highly probable, as so many experts believed during the Cold War, then the fact that we now live in a universe where it has not (yet) occurred could be construed as a validation of Everett’s theory because it would be improbable that a nuclear war did not occur if there was only one universe!
4 Ponturo, J. (1979). 176–177.
5 WSEG Report 45. (1960). 148. This report, issued on September 23, 1959 was incorporated into Report 50.
6 Preemptive warfare is defined by the U.S. military as “An attack initiated on the basis of incontrovertible evidence that an enemy attack is imminent.” Preventive warfare is “A war initiated in the belief that military conflict, while not imminent, is inevitable, and that to delay would involve greater risk.” The distinction between these two aggressive doctrines becomes meaningless if intelligence findings are cooked and manipulated.
7 Building expensive ABM [anti-ballistic missile] systems would be militarily ineffective, said WSEG, but could be justified “principally on political or psychological grounds,” i.e. psyching the American people into believing that they were safer than they were. WSEG Report 45. (1959). 8.
8 WSEG Report 50. (1960). “Enclosure C, National Command and Control Vulnerability” as summed up in Wainstein et al. (1975). 241. Partial text, original classification: top secret. Available at National Security Archive.
9 WSEG Report 50. (1960). “Enclosure A, Evaluation of Programmed Offensive Systems 1964–1967,” Third Volume, 58–62.
10 WSEG Report 50. (1960). “Enclosure I, Changes in the Free World.” 14.
11 Ibid. 57.
12 Ibid. 14–21.
13 Ibid. 21.
14 Ibid. 30.
15 Herken, G. (1987). 126.
16 WSEG Report 50. (1960). “Enclosure I, Changes in the Free World.” 43, 102.
17 Ibid. 18. Italics added.
18 Ibid. 127.
19 WSEG Report 50. (1960). “Enclosure J, Strategic Implications of Possible Changes in the Nature of the Threat.” 2.
20 Ibid. 5.
21 Ibid. 52.
22 Ibid. 9–10.
23 Ibid. 13–14. Italics added.
24 Ibid. 20. Italics added.
25 Ibid. 21.
26 Ibid. 48.
27 Ibid. 52–53.
28 Ibid. 3.
29 WSEG Report 50. (1960). “Enclosure A, Second Volume.” 22. The generalized Lagrange multiplier method allowed computer simulations to reflect real world scenarios in which bombs and missiles were deployed in integer amounts, not fractions.
30 WSEG Report 50. (1960). “Enclosure F, Estimated Costs of Strategic Offensive Weapons Systems.” 2.
31 Pugh, G. E. (2005). 45.
32 Ball, D. (1980). 37; Kaplan, F. (1983). 258–262.
33 Ball, D. (1980). 39.
34 Ball, D. (1980). 250.
35 Kaplan, F. (1983). 320–321.
36 In 1980 Desmond Ball published Politics and Force Levels, the Strategic Missile Program of the Kennedy Administration. He interviewed Everett and Pugh and many other players in the operations research that underpinned the adoption of assured destruction. Among Everett’s papers is an early version of the book, a typescript.
37 Ball, D. (1980). 171; interior quotation from McNamara, R. S. (1967).
38 Ball, D. (1980). 185.
39 At an international conference in 1968, national security expert, Jan M. Lodal, summarized Everett’s contribution to MAD: “Mathematically, an Assured Destruction problem can be framed as a two-sided, zero-sum game. The initial attacker should allocate both his offensive and defensive weapons to minimize the maximum amount of damage the other side could do in return, assuming that the other side would allocate his weapons to maximize the same measure of damage. However, the set of possible strategies is so large that the usual methods of solving two-sided games cannot be used. Consequently, we have reduced the problem to two separate resource allocation problems by making use of an intermediate set of values for U.S. weapons, and have used a modified Lagrange multiplier method [Everett’s] to solve the allocation problems. We have thus used [Everett’s generalized] Lagrange multipliers to approximate minimax strategies for a two-sided game with discrete strategy sets.” Lodal, J. M. (1969).
40 Pugh, G. E. (2005). 35.
41 Report 50 asserted that building a successful ABM system, combined with the sheltering of hundreds of millions of people from blast and fallout effects, could save 40–60 million lives. Depending on the mix of urban and rural sheltering, the cost of sheltering a person reached as high as $1,400; the per capita costs of an ABM system were similarly prohibitive. WSEG Report 50. (1960). “Enclosure A, Third Volume.” 82.
1 National Security Council. (1958). 5.
2 Ponturo, J. (1979). 242–244.