by Peter Byrne
45 Everett to Harvey, 5/20/77. He also told Harvey that the ms. was his “last remaining copy.”
46 I have seen the book and identified the handwriting (not to mention the tone) as Everett’s. Mark Everett has no idea of how it ended up in the used bookstore. It might have been sold by Liz, or someone who stole it from the Everett household: or, perhaps, by Everett himself in a fit of pique.
1 Interview, 2007.
2 Bell, J. S. (1964).
3 Bell’s theorem asserts that a change in one particle in an entangled two-particle system instantaneously impacts the other particle. Even for two particles separated by light years, the wave function of the whole two particle system changes without, apparently, violating the dynamical law prohibiting faster than light information transfers. Experimentally validated, Bell’s “inequalities” raised deep questions, which Bell believed would only be resolved when the quantum mechanical description of reality is superseded by “an imaginative leap that will astonish us…. In this it is like all theories made by man. But to an unusual extent its ultimate fate is apparent in its internal structure. [Quantum mechanics] carries in itself the seeds of its own destruction.” Bell, J. S. (1966).
4 Bell, J. S. (1981).
5 Particularly Dieter Zeh, Wocjiech H. Zurek, James B. Hartle, Murray Gell-Mann, Robert B. Griffiths, Erich Joos.
6 Rosenfeld was being sarcastic since “preestablished harmony” was a mystical, consciousness-centered view of physical reality proposed by Gottfried Leibniz in the 17th century. He typically labeled any idea that disagreed with Bohr’s ideas as “theological,” so now Bell, by dealing with Everett seriously, was a theologian, in Rosenfeld’s eyes.
7 Rosenfeld to Bell, 11/30/71.
8 Belinfante, F. J. (1975).
9 Brown, H. (1979).
10 Belinfante, F. J. (1975). 51–52.
11 Rosenfeld to Belinfante, 6/22/72.
12 Rosenfeld to Belinfante, 8/24/72.
13 Rosenfeld to Belinfante, 10/31/72.
14 Brown, H. (1979). 189.
15 Zurek interview, 2006.
16 Conferences at University of Oxford (2007), Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics (2007), FQXi Azores (2009).
17 Davies, P. C. W. (1974). A “complimentary” edition of book was sent to Everett, who read at least the pages on which his own name appeared.
18 Borges, J. (1962). 100.
1 DeWitt, B. and Graham, N. eds. (1973). 109.
2 Liz later moved to Hawaii to live with the soldier.
3 In his popular book, The Fabric of Reality (1997), Deutsch constructs a candidate “theory of everything” by interweaving Everett’s many worlds scheme with the ideas of Karl Popper (epistemology), Alan Turing (computation), and Richard Dawkins (evolutionary biology); Deutsch’s remembrances of Everett are from interviews with the author.
4 Deutsch’s recollection of Everett’s answer is worth quoting in its entirety, as there is no other record of him addressing this question after the Xavier conference. “When I asked him what defines the Hilbert space basis with respect to which one defines ‘universes’, in the general case (not just perfect measurements, where the answer is obvious), he said it was the structure of the system itself. I asked, which aspect of the structure the state itself, the Hamiltonian or what? He said the Hamiltonian, but he didn’t think that this was an important issue.” Deutsch email to Shikhovtsev, 2000.
5 Deutsch interview, 2004.
6 Wheeler to Benioff, 7/7/77.
7 Wheeler to Benioff, 9/7/77.
8 Documents in basement.
9 Basement.
10 Everett to Wheeler, 3/21/79.
11 Wheeler to Mr. & Mrs. Hugh Everett, 7/12/79.
12 Wheeler to Scalapino, 7/12/79.
13 DeWitt to Wheeler, 9/25/79.
14 Everett to Raub, 4/7/80.
15 Deutsch interview, 2006.
1 Laplace, P.S. (1814). “Philosophical Essay on Probability.” Quoted in Wheeler, J. A. (1977). 11.
2 Wheeler to Jammer, 3/19/72.
3 Jammer to Everett, 8/28/73.
4 Everett to Jammer, 9/19/73.
5 Wheeler. J. A. (1957A).
6 Wheeler, J. A. (1973).
7 Ibid. 232.
8 Ibid. 232.
9 Ibid. 242.
10 Ibid. 244.
11 Ibid. 244.
12 Wheeler, J. A. (1977).
13 Ibid. 2.
14 Ibid. 13.
15 Ibid. 14.
16 Wigner, E. (1981). 289.
17 Ibid. 294.
18 Wigner, E. (1973). 382.
19 Lévy-Leblond, J. (1976).
20 Lévy-Leblond to Everett, 9/17/78.
21 Everett to Lévy-Leblond, 11/15/77. Either Everett or Lévy-Leblond had the year wrong.
22 Lévy-Leblond, J. (1976). 194.
23 Wheeler, J. A. (1985). 363.
24 Ibid. 365.
25 Wheeler, J. A. (1979A).
26 A Hamiltonian is a function used to express the energy of a system.
27 Ibid. 396.
28 Wheeler, J. A. and W. H. Zurek (1983). 201.
29 In 2001, Wheeler co-authored a paper with cosmologist (and Everett-fan) Max Tegmark, “100 Years of the Quantum.” The paper explains how decoherence may be construed to solve the preferred basis problem in the many worlds interpretation, and it credits Everett with causing a shift in how physicists interpret quantum mechanics as fundamentally unitary (non-collapsing). Tegmark, M. and Wheeler, J. A. (2001).
1 Fromm, E. (1955). 65.
2 This narrative is based on interviews from 2006 to 2009 with Mark Everett and many of Everett’s colleagues and friends.
3 In late 2007, Reisler was diagnosed with lung cancer, which his doctors attributed to being around Everett’s second-hand smoke. Reisler private communication, 2007.
4 Tsiang to Nancy Everett, 7/22/82. Tsiang’s relationship to Everett was purely Platonic.
5 Quotes from Tsiang interview and Tsiang private communications; Dawkin’s selfish gene theory asserts that humans are vehicles used by genes to reproduce themselves, although the theory is not reducible to that observation.
6 Lynch interview. Everett obviously liked Lynch, who describes himself as “anarcho-capitalist.” He refuses to allow the government to take his photograph, so he cannot drive a car, nor fly on airplanes. He is, however, one of the few people that Everett talked to about his theory in his later years. Lynch has his own strange tale of how he got his job at DBS after being unfairly imprisoned for burglarizing the firm: http://www.keithlynch.net/prison.html.
7 Reisler interview, 2006, Lynch interview.
8 Basement files, Everett family interviews.
9 Colonel Everett was a dogged advocate for his own interests. In the basement is a file of letters documenting his tussle with the Internal Revenue Service over an audit of his 1960 tax return (he was also audited in 1957 and 1959). He wrote to high ranking IRS officials that the IRS auditor had been “motivated by malice or sheer stupidity [and] I am concerned that something must be done to … remove the incompetent from the public payroll.” He complained that his tax dollars were being “frittered away in the Congo.” And he buried the IRS in details about the cost of every item in his home, including light bulbs. In the end, the IRS capitulated. The colonel also received tax-free disability payments from the Army, although there is no record of a service-related disability, and he was in fine health when he retired.
10 Mark Everett, private communication, June 2009.
11 Spreadsheets; IRS Estate Tax form; probate filing for IRS.
12 Report of autopsy, Chief Medical Examiner, No. Va. District, 7/30/82; interview with cardiologist Dr. Patrick Devlin.
13 American Institute of Physics, National Registry of Scientific and Technical Personnel, 5/14/57.
1 Fromm, E. (1955). 23–24.
2 Everett, Nancy to Everett, Mark, 9/27/82.
3 Davies, P. C. W. (1982). 122–126. In the many worlds interpretation, the anthropic pri
nciple can be pulled inside out to skewer the intelligent design hypothesis: If our universe is but one of many worlds, then its fine-tuned improbability is unremarkable and a type of evidence for the existence of multiple universes, since our world would not be likely to exist unless there was a spectrum of worlds.
4 Everett, Liz to Everett, Mark, 10/15/91.
5 Everett, Nancy to Everett, Mark, 4/26/96.
6 Ibid.
7 Recall that Nancy had kept Everett’s ashes in a filing cabinet before throwing them in the trash, as per his request.
8 Mark Everett, personal communication, 2009.
1 Popper, K. (1982). 1.
2 Writing for Scientific American, Max Tegmark identifies four different kinds of parallel universes: 1. an infinite universe in which all events would occur repeatedly outside our cosmic horizon; 2. bubble universes of the eternally inflating string theory “Landscape” type; 3. the Everettian many worlds model; 4. Platonic mathematical structures that do not distinguish between the physical and the abstract, giving form to all possible worlds. Tegmark, M. (2003).
3 Wells, H. G. (1922).
4 Leinster, M. (1978). 20.
5 Miller, W. M. and Greenberg, M. H. (1983). 39.
6 Ibid. 5.
7 Pohl, F. (1986). 58. Pohl. © 1986.
8 Pullman says he was inspired to write about multiple universes after attending a lecture on the many worlds interpretation by University of Oxford physicist, David Deutsch.
9 Popper, K. (1982). 90.
10 Ibid. 42.
11 Ibid. 187.
12 Ibid. 89.
13 Ibid. 94.
14 DeWitt, B. and Graham, N. eds. (1973). 94–100; Everett did not have the last word on this difficult problem, of course, and Popper’s worry remains real as we do not see large objects moving backwards in time, but given the reversibility of the Schrödinger equation, that is not unthinkable.
15 Mesoscopic superpositions have been experimentally witnessed in double slit-type interferences of fullerenes. Superpositions of quantum objects have been recorded in experiments using Josephson junctions, atom interferometry, ion traps, microwave cavities. See Zurek, W. H. (2002). 6.
16 Saunders, S., “Many Worlds: An Introduction,” in Saunders, S, Barrett, J., Kent, A., and Wallace, D. eds. (2010).
17 Bell, J. S. (1987). 171.
18 Because of the superposition property, it is thought that a quantum computer will be able to process information exponentially faster than its classical counterpart. Classical transistors are limited to holding values 0 or 1. A qubit can hold a superposition of values 0 and 1! When linked in arrays of entangled qubits, the processors will operate exponentially faster than non-quantum processors. The trick is to extract the answer from the superposition without destroying the answer.
19 Zeh, H. D. (1970).
20 Camilleri, K. (2008).
21 Zeh, private communications, 2008. See Chapter 15 for Everett’s view of how microscopic systems interact with their environments.
22 Interview with Zeh recorded by Fabio Freitas 7/25/08. See also: Camilleri, K. (2009) and Freire, O. (2009).
23 Camilleri, K. (2008). The term “decoherence” was coined in the late 1980s.
24 Zurek, W. H. (1981). Zurek adds that “the central idea was to apply the insight of Bohr (that measurement alters the quantum state) with Everett’s insistence that everything (including information transfer that occurs in measurements) can be modeled using quantum theory.” Zurek, W. H., private communication, June 2009.
25 Also called “pointer basis,” as the needle or pointer of a measurement apparatus only points to one number on a dial at a time, not a superposition of numbers. See Chapter 16 for a related discussion of preferred basis and decoherence.
26 Zurek had previously published two papers laying out the basic idea of decoherence as a loss of information as a superposition decomposes and entangles with the environment. See Zurek, W. H. (1981).
27 Zurek, W. H. (2003); Zurek, W. H. (2005). In analyzing Zurek’s derivation, Arthur Fine and Maximilian Schlosshauer point out that, in general, the problem of assumptions of probability in proposed derivations “of the Born rule can be traced back to a fundamental statement about any probabilistic theory: We cannot derive probabilities from a theory that does not already contain some probabilistic concept; at some stage we need to ‘put probabilities in to get probabilities out.’” They praise Zurek for advancing our understanding of this problem by a “quantum leap.” Schlosshauer, M. and A. Fine (2005).
28 Zurek, W. H. interview with author, 2006; private communications, 2009.
29 Zurek, W. H. (2007).
30 Zeh to Wheeler, 10/30/80.
31 Zeh, H. D. (2009). 15. See also: Zeh, H. D. (2000).
32 According to Kristian Camilleri, Zeh’s interpretation of decoherence reflects the philosophy of the neo-Kantian Hans Vaihinger who argues “that the underlying reality of the world remains unknowable, but we behave ‘as if’ the constructions of physics such as electrons, protons and electromagnetic waves exist, and to this extent such ‘heuristic fiction’ constitutes our reality. In this way, Zeh argued that the universal wave function may be employed as a ‘heuristic fiction,’ but it is no less ‘real’ than the entities posited by other physical theories (e.g. quarks), the existence of which is routinely taken for granted.” Camilleri, K. (2008).
33 The question is often posed: how can a universe decohere when it does not have an environment? There are several ways to answer this, including that only local pieces of it need decohere, so the whole universe does not have to decohere, or the environment of a universe decohering non-locally is the multiverse, which, by definition, never wholly decoheres.
34 Hartle, private communication, July 2009.
35 Stein, H. (1984).
36 Geroch, R. (1984).
37 Hellman, G. (2009). 221.
38 As we shall learn in the next chapter, several philosophers have proposed pseudo-Everettian theories that claim it is not the physical observer that splits as universes branch, but only human consciousness that branches into many “minds” governed by “Mind,” echoing the religio-idealism of Katharine Kennedy Everett’s poem, “Unified Field.”
39 Healey, R. A. (1984).
40 Zurek, W. H. (ed.) (1990). vii–ix.
41 In a nutshell, algorithmic information content (AIC) measures the entropy (information) of a message. One presenter perceived a version of AIC in Everett’s correlation equations.
42 Zurek, W. H. (ed.) (1990). 425–458. Cal-Tech’s Gell-Mann was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1969 for work on particle physics. University of California Santa Barbara’s Hartle has done important work on cosmology and quantum gravity with Stephen Hawking and others.
43 Hartle, J. B. (1968). Hartle’s probability derivation from the quantum formalism was similar to Graham’s method of deriving probability in the Everett scheme, although each arrived at their conclusion independently. However, Hartle’s derivation has proven to be more robust and influential.
44 Zurek, W. H. (ed.) (1990). 440.
45 Hartle, private communication, 2009; Hartle says that the consistent histories approach (which is also due to work by Robert Griffiths and Roland Omnes) does not contradict Bohr: “Copenhagen quantum mechanics is not an alternative to decoherent histories, but rather contained within it as an approximation appropriate for idealized measurement situations.” Hartle, J. B. (2008). 17. As we learned in Chapter 15, Everett said that his model “generalized” Bohr, by which he meant that it superceded Bohr’s self-limiting explanation by treating the universe as whole.
46 Halliwell, J. (1991). 76.
1 Bell, J. S. (1987). 117.
2 Formulated in 1986 by Italian physicists G. C. Ghiradi, A. Rimini, and T. Weber.
3 Bohr opposed privileging the role of human consciousness, but the Copenhagen Interpretation can be construed as anti-realist because it places the measuring device forever outside the wave function. Few modern physicists or philos
ophers are satisfied with Bohr’s emphasis on the primacy of classical physics, although it remains influential, probably due to cultural inertia and the lack of a commonly accepted alternative. Eminent physicist, N. David Mermin, for example, is attracted to the Copenhagen viewpoint, noting that “quantum states are calculational devices and not real properties of a system.” Mermin, N. D. (2009). 8.