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

  The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III

  The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III

  Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family

  Peter Byrne

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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  © Peter Byrne 2010

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  Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

  First published 2010

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

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  Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

  Printed in Great Britain

  on acid-free paper

  by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

  ISBN 978–0–19–955227–6 (Hbk.)

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Dedicated to Stacey L. Evans

  and our son, Miles Patrick Byrne.

  These necromantic books are heavenly,

  Lines, circles, scenes, letters and characters:

  Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.

  Oh, what a world of profit and delight,

  Of power, of honour, of omnipotence,

  Is promised to the studious artizan!

  All things that move between the quiet poles

  Shall be at my command. Emperors and kings

  Are but obeyed in their several provinces.

  Nor can they raise the wind or rend the clouds.

  But his dominion that exceeds in this

  Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man:

  A sound magician is a demi-god.

  Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Act One, Scene One, 1592.

  What is that little Devil’s pitchfork?

  Mark Everett, 2007. Upon seeing ψ, the Greek letter (psi)

  symbolizing the quantum mechanical wave function.

  Contents

  Forewords

  Book 1: Beginnings

  Introduction: The Story of Q

  1 Family Origins: a Sketch

  2 Katharine: the Dark Star

  3 The Scientist as a Young Man

  4 Stranger in Paradise

  Book 2: Game World

  5 Demigods

  6 Decisions, Decisions—the Theory of Games

  7 Origin of MAD

  8 von Neumann’s Legacy

  Book 3: Quantum World

  9 Quantum Everett

  10 More on the Measurement Problem

  11 Collapse and Complementarity

  12 The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics

  Book 4: Everett and Wheeler

  13 Wheeler: the Radical Conservative

  14 Genesis of Many Worlds

  15 Alone in the Room

  16 Tour of Many Worlds

  17 The Battle with Copenhagen, Part I

  18 The Battle with Copenhagen, Part II

  19 The Chapel Hill Affair

  Book 5: Possible World Futures

  20 Preparing for World War III

  21 From Wargasm to Looking Glass

  22 Fallout

  Book 6: Crossroads

  23 A Bell Jar World

  24 A Vacation in Copenhagen

  Book 7: Assured Destruction

  25 Everett and Report 50

  26 Everett and the SIOP

  Book 8: Transitions

  27 Behind Closed Doors

  28 Death’s Other Kingdoms

  Book 9: Beltway Bandit

  29 Weaponeering

  30 The Bayesian Machine

  31 The Death of Lambda

  Book 10: Many Worlds Reborn

  32 DeWitt to the Rescue

  33 Records in Time

  34 Austin

  35 Wheeler Recants

  Book 11: American Tragedy

  36 The Final Years

  37 Aftermath

  Book 12: Everett’s Legacy

  38 Modern Everett

  39 Everett goes to Oxford

  Epilogue: Beyond Many Worlds

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Index

  Forewords

  The Boxes

  Growing up in my family once was odd enough. I had no desire to do it again. As a means of survival, I decided I had to always be moving forward. I ran to California and made a new life for myself. After the deaths of my father, mother and sister, I was left with the grizzly task of going back to the family house in Virginia and cleaning it out. I only had a few days to go through 35 years of boxes that had accumulated during the family’s time in the house, as well as decade upon decade’s worth of my grandparents’, great grandparents’, and so on’s boxes.

  Back in California, I unceremoniously stacked box after box of my family’s past onto shelves in the dirt-floored crawl-space section of my basement. They sat there gathering dust for nearly another decade while I made music in the room directly on the other side of the wall.

  I knew the day was coming when the boxes would have to be opened. I just didn’t want to be the one to do it. Although I’ve been lucky enough to end up being happy with my life (part hard work, part miracle) and feeling at peace with my family history, I still don’t relish going back to that world. If I play a concert in the Washington, D.C. area, the moment I step off the plane I can smell death in the air. I was sure those boxes held the same smell.

  Luckily Peter Byrne came along to smell those boxes for me. The boxes have now become this book and I’ve learned a lot from what Peter found in them. Family secrets and secrets to the universe written on legal pads, diary pages, check stubs, and napkins. Peter managed to dig through the smell and bring the people buried in the boxes back to life. Alternately enlightening and troubling, like any good book should be.

  It’s an endlessly strange feeling being the lone survivor of the family. I’m pretty busy these days with my own job. It’s been a great pleasure to have this new part-time job of helping my father get the attention he
didn’t get while he was alive. I’ve learned to forgive him for his shortcomings as a father by identifying with him in some ways. I recommend it, if you haven’t tried it.

  Mark Oliver Everett

  Los Feliz, California

  My Friend, Hugh

  Hugh Everett III and I were fellow graduate students at Princeton, roommates one semester and close friends throughout. We each completed PhD dissertations in 1957, which were published that year in Reviews of Modern Physics, but our research relations with John Archibald Wheeler, who endorsed these degrees, were very different. My work was to add some fancy mathematics to an idea that Wheeler suggested. Hugh’s work and the arguments to support it were all originated by Hugh. Wheeler served as his public relations manager, trying to negotiate peace between Hugh’s upstart (but logical) ideas and the widely accepted (and hardly contested) interpretation of quantum mechanics attributed to Niels Bohr, Wheeler’s mentor.

  Hugh’s thesis topic was much influenced by his personality. As Peter Byrne says, after extensive conversations with Hugh’s acquaintances, “He loved to argue.” I think it was his favorite sport, closely related to what was then called “oneupmanship.” So when Niels Bohr visited Princeton, and his young assistant tried to explain Bohr’s views on quantum mechanics, Hugh found it medieval: While mathematically formulated physics applied to everything when no one was looking, as soon as the results were to be unveiled God threw the dice (which Einstein doubted) and reset the equations to a probabilistically chosen result. So Hugh looked at what would be predicted if the mathematical formulation (the Schrödinger equation) were assumed to work all the time. He found, to his delight, that this implied a preposterous view of the world that was just as unintuitive as Copernicus’ 16th century view that we, sitting comfortably in our chairs, are moving at tremendous speed through the solar system. So Hugh obtained a psychological prize in that no one could fault his logic, even if they couldn’t stomach his conclusions. The most common reaction to this dilemma was just to ignore Hugh’s work.

  Quantum physicists had their hands full around 1957 with exciting research that found Bohr’s viewpoint adequate. New elementary particles were being discovered and their relations systematized; mirror symmetry violation led to a Nobel prize; nuclear structure was beginning to make sense; the maser was about to be upgraded to the laser; the relativistic quantum theory of light and electrons was being widely understood, as was the source of energy in the Sun; superconductivity had just been explained, and condensed matter theory was flowering supported by the success of the transistor. None of this would benefit by using Hugh’s view of the quantum instead of Bohr’s. To speak of the wave function of the Universe, as Wheeler and I were willing to do, implied a viewpoint different from Bohr’s, but serious consideration of quantum effects in the (then still questionable) Big Bang would not occur until a couple of decades later, and gravity and cosmology were, in 1957, not generally considered ripe for attention. So Hugh had a long wait before his dissertation began to be appreciated, all of which this book describes.

  Hugh would, of course, have been happy if his quantum ideas were noticed and applauded, but when they were mostly ignored he was instead chagrined and perplexed. He could not understand why a perfectly logical idea had so little impact. But he had more important things to do than help the world properly understand quantum theory. He needed a job that would make lots of money and keep him out of the post-Korean War draft. As I learned from this book, he (with George Pugh) may have helped cool down the Cold War by analyzing the global effects of radioactive fallout.

  The present situation for the interpretation of quantum mechanics is that several important fields of physics are uncomfortable with Bohr’s viewpoint. Some participants work with Everett’s view, others try to develop alternatives to both Bohr and Everett without the philosophically troubling “many worlds” picture that Everett proposed. The most important problems that demand an alternative to the “Copenhagen interpretation” preached by Bohr are: (a) modeling the early stages of the Big Bang Universe and (b) designing a quantum computer. Fundamental research useful toward solving these two problems are studies in the field of mesoscopic physics, which means physics involving few enough atoms that quantum effects can be expected, but in large enough numbers that they should tend toward classical (non-quantum) behaviors. These studies also go by the names “quantum-classical transition,” or “decoherence.” The researchers in these fields all know of Everett’s ideas. Some buy his views enthusiastically, others look for other ways to let the Schrödinger equation operate steadily (with no mystical interruptions for the “collapse of the wave function”), but without the Universe branching into Hugh’s continually multiplying “many worlds”.

  It may take many decades for mathematical progress to be matched by philosophical understanding. Hugh Everett proposed that we not search for remedies for the implausible “collapse of the wave function” by changing the mathematics of the Schrödinger equation (or its relativistic field theory upgrades), but instead just look hard at what would be predicted if we let the equations show us how they think Nature behaves. Now, over 50 years later, there is a strong effort to do just that, but the broad picture is not yet clear. Thus my guess for the outcome of the active search for a satisfactory understanding of quantum mechanics, is that some different “big picture” will arise, which is not “many worlds,” but which still upholds Hugh Everett’s conviction that paranormal influences will not overrule the Schrödinger equation.

  Charles W. Misner

  University of Maryland

  BOOK 1

  BEGINNINGS

  Introduction: The Story of Q

  We can believe that we will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.

  J. A. Wheeler, 19731

  On January 2, 1971 two U.S. Air Marshals were stewarding a White House courier from Dulles Airport in Virginia to Los Angeles. The courier was en route to the “western White House” in San Clemente, California, carrying classified information to Dr. Henry Kissinger, national security advisor to President Richard Nixon. Their flight was delayed due to bad weather, so the courier and his bodyguards lounged at the bar in the airline’s Admiral Club. They chatted about the nature of their jobs, complaining about having to work over the holidays.

  Nearby, a heavy-set, goateed man wearing a black suit was drinking gin and chain-smoking Kent cigarettes stuck in a long filter. He listened intently to the idle talk, from which he deduced the couriers’ profession.

  On the night flight to California, the goateed man enjoyed several more drinks. Returning to his seat after visiting the rest room, he suddenly pulled out a miniature camera and photographed one of the federal marshals. Startled, the marshal demanded, “Why did you do that?” The man with the camera replied, enigmatically, “For my files.” Concerned, the marshal ducked into the cockpit. He radioed ahead asking for an FBI agent to meet the plane so that the interloper could be detained. But the agent was tardy in arriving, and the mystery man disappeared into the crowd.

  Fearful that the nation’s security had been compromised, the agent telexed a report to top FBI officials. Inquiries were made, and agents determined that the goateed man was Dr. Hugh Everett III, president of Lambda Corporation of Arlington, Virginia, which designed “computer modules.” They tracked Everett to his room at a Holiday Inn near Santa Barbara, where he was attending a conference on advanced techniques in data processing. Sheepishly, he explained to FBI interrogators that he had been “affected” by several drinks, and that taking the photograph, “was merely a stupid act that he did on the spur of the moment.” He had “no ulterior motive,” and his “for my file” remark was said to get a “reaction” from the marshals. “He was extremely apologetic and embarrassed over the incident.”2

  The U.S. Attorney decided that Everett had not violated any statutes, and the matter was consigned to FBI files. But what the agents did not record, if they knew it at all, was tha
t the goateed man had an incredibly high national security clearance, a “Q” clearance, which allowed him access to some of the Pentagon’s most precious secrets, including the software he had designed for targeting cities with nuclear weapons in a hot war. A programming genius, Everett had also designed algorithms for the National Security Agency, the code-breaking “puzzle palace,” the very existence of which was a state secret. If FBI officials knew that the man behind the miniature spy camera was a Q, they may well have wondered just how safe the nation’s military and intelligence jewels were in the hands of such an impetuous inebriate. But even though excessive drinking was technically a cause for stripping a Q of his security clearance, the culture of the national security bureaucracy easily tolerated alcoholics.