The many worlds of tragedy of Hugh Everett III

There’s no shortage of tragedy in the life stories of great scientists. Max Planck had his life ripped apart and his son murdered by the Nazi regime. Ludwig Boltzmann committed suicide in a fit of depression, just as his theories were starting to win out against long-term opposition.

But for my money, the most quietly tragic life might have been lived by Hugh Everett III, the originator of the “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. This is the controversial interpretation, so beloved of science fiction writers, in which the whole world we see around us is recognised as the tiniest slice of a truly enormous objective reality - one which every possibility since the start of the universe has been realised. Everett came up with the overall idea as a young graduate student, and the detailed working through of the mathematics behind it became his PhD thesis.¹

Everett’s tragedies were almost entirely self-inflicted. He was a coruscatingly brilliant student: in his first year at graduate school he published a paper on “Recursive Games” that John Nash² considered extraordinary, and is now thought of as a classic of game theory. He studied quantum mechanics with Eugene Wigner, and wrote his PhD thesis under the guidance of John Wheeler.³

But even as a student, Everett was addicted to alcohol, food and tobacco, and he could not afford to indulge these whims on a junior academic salary. So even before his PhD thesis had been accepted, he took up a job in operations research at the Pentagon, ignoring Wheeler’s pleas to stay in physics, or at least come with him to Copenhagen and talk about his quantum mechanical ideas with Niels Bohr.⁴

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Everett’s later work is almost all highly classified, but the fragments that have now been published give an idea of what he spent his life doing. These analyses are on kill ratios in the outcomes of nuclear war — how many would live and die in each stage of nuclear exchanges; whether the US or Russia would be able to absorb more casualties before completely collapsing as a military and political force.

We also know that Everett led the team that programmed the SIOP (Single Integrated Operating Plan) computers that would have launched the missiles to wipe out much of the population of Europe. They went operational in 1962.

Hugh Everett suffered from depression his whole life, and it’s difficult to think that his work helped. In any case, his depressive episodes got progressively worse, as did his addictions. He had married his wife Nancy in graduate school, but he continued womanising and seeing prostitutes, while growing obese and becoming more and more of an alcoholic. Nancy repeatedly cheated on him in return.

He was never very commercially successful. Some of the methods that he came up with: “attribute value” algorithms and the generalised Lagrange multiplier method, were later adopted widely, and made millionaires of some of his colleagues. But Everett himself was never able to fully capitalise on his insights, and his spending more than matched his income. Towards the end of his life, he was verging on bankruptcy.

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But the greatest harm Everett caused was to his family. Somehow he never felt able to show affection to his children: Elizabeth and Mark, both of whom had their own struggles, and openly craved his love.

Elizabeth first attempted suicide in 1982. Mark found her unconscious on the bathroom floor, and got her to hospital just in time. When he returned home that night, he remembers his father looking up from his newspaper and saying mildly, “I didn’t know she was that sad”.

Everett himself died just a month later, at 51, of a heart attack brought on by his obesity and unhealthy lifestyle. Mark — then 19 — was the one who found his father’s body, and as he felt for a pulse, realised that it was the first time he could remember touching him.

In 1996, Elizabeth succeeded in her latest suicide attempt - her ninth - after being institutionalised for some years and undergoing extensive electroshock therapy. She left a note, saying she wanted to join her father in another universe.

Two years later, Nancy died of lung cancer, almost certainly due to second-hand smoke from her husband.

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Mark Everett is still around. In fact, you have probably heard of him. He usually goes just by “E” and in 1995, he formed a band, where he serves as the front-man and driving force: The Eels.

In recent years, Mark has opened up more about his father, and has given historians of science access to his family’s papers. He even uses his real name from time to time.

(Image Source: Eels - official Band Website)

So, if you have ever wondered where song titles like “Elizabeth on the Bathroom Floor”, or indeed an album title like “Electro-Shock Blues” comes from … well, that’s where.

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One of the things that turned up in Mark’s recent looks through his family boxes is a 1977 dictaphone recording of his father talking to Charles Misner, an old college friend and expert on General Relativity.⁵

This is eerie for historians of science to listen to, because in 1954, it was a drunken conversation between a much younger Everett and Misner that gave Everett the first ideas that he went on to develop into the Many Worlds interpretation.

In the recording, the two reminisce about the origins of these quantum mechanical ideas, while in the background, you can hear Mark practising on the drums.

1. His full dissertation is freely available, and despite its old-fashioned style, and direct use of the mathematics, it makes a clearer and more direct presentation of “The Theory of the Universal Wavefunction” than you will find in most popular treatments.

2. A future Nobel winner for his own work on game theory, and the subject of the film “A Beautiful Mind”.

3. It’s difficult to articulate quite what “Studied with Wigner and Wheeler” implies. Easier just to namedrop a couple of Wheeler’s other graduate students at the time: Jacob Bekenstein and Richard Feynman.

4. He did eventually make a trip to Copenhagen, and the effort to convince Bohr and his circle was - in Everett’s own words - “doomed from the start”.

5. For physicists: yes, that Misner, of Misner, Thorne and Wheeler, the General Relativity textbook massive enough to convincingly warp spacetime.