»  The Fortnightly Review

December 9th, 2010

  A nearly forgotten man of many universes


The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III
by Peter Byrne
Oxford University Press; 456 pp. $45

Quantum mechanics (hereinafter QM) is famously odd. As Peter Byrne notes in this book:


The measurement problem is especially knotty. Down in the subatomic realm, each of the particles that constitute matter is smeared out over a volume of space in a manner described mathematically by a "wave function." When an observer interacts with this wave function by taking a measurement, the wave function suddenly manifests as a particle with a position and speed to which numbers can be assigned. It ceases to be a quantum-mechanical phenomenon and becomes a "classical" one. This seems to give the observer's consciousness a privileged position in our description of the world.

As well as making physicists deeply uncomfortable, this state of affairs raises difficult philosophical problems. Does QM describe all of reality? Including the observer? Then this peculiar "collapse of the wave function" when a measurement is made should itself be susceptible to a QM explanation. Or is the observer a classical "island" in a QM world? And what if there is more than one observer? Which observer's consciousness then causes the wave function to collapse? Could the consciousness of, say, a mouse, cause the collapse? (This precise question was asked by a skeptical Albert Einstein in his last public lecture.) Could a smart machine?

As Byrne has told us, these are still open questions, so much so that Oxford University offers a degree course in Physics and Philosophy. The associated research group is, the university's course description says, "extremely active." Some of the best minds on the planet have been working on the QM paradoxes for decades.

Among those first-class minds was the one belonging to Hugh Everett III, an American who lived from 1930 to 1982, mostly near Washington, D.C. In this biography of Everett, Peter Byrne interleaves Everett's personal story with an account of the main trends in thinking about QM across the second half of the 20th century.

Everett's contribution to the QM debates was of an unusually one-off character. He worked on his doctoral thesis at Princeton through 1954-5, finally submitting its 137 typed pages to his adviser, John Wheeler, in January 1956. The title of the thesis was "Quantum Mechanics by the Method of the Universal Wave Function." After Wheeler had absorbed the paper and recommended some small changes it was distributed, under a different title, to leading physicists, including Niels Bohr.

Wheeler was a first-rank physicist of the previous generation. (His dates are 1911-2008.) Like most such, he revered Niels Bohr, the godfather of QM. Bohr had taken a utilitarian view of the QM paradoxes, a view much influenced by linguistic philosophy and wary of metaphysics: asking not "What physical reality underlies these observations?" but "What future observations can be predicted from these?" This view is known as the Copenhagen Interpretation, from the location of Bohr's research institute.

Bohr and other Copenhagenists reacted rather strongly against Everett's ideas. As a result, Wheeler pressured his student to revise the thesis. Everett, anxious to get his doctorate, did so. The thesis, drastically reduced — by 75 percent, says Byrne — at last appeared in a scholarly journal in July 1957. The world of physics took no notice of it. Wheeler reminisced in his old age that Everett "was disappointed, perhaps bitter, at the non-reaction to his theory." Everett had in fact already left Academia to embark on a career in what Eisenhower later, in his farewell address, called "the military industrial complex." He had also acquired a wife and baby daughter.


In 1964 he founded an independent consultancy, then left it in 1973 to found another one. His consultancy work began as a continuation of his defense studies, in the gruesome calculus of megadeath nuclear exchanges, on contract to the Pentagon. It ended in the equally gruesome — though admittedly less lethal — calculus of Affirmative Action, applying mathematical models to seek patterns of "discrimination" in hiring, housing, and education on behalf of civilian federal agencies. Everett's career traveled, you might say, along a geodesic in the U.S.A.'s curved sociocultural space during the third quarter of the 20th century, from Mutual Assured Destruction to War on Poverty. Along the way he wrecked his health, though not quite his marriage, with heroic levels of smoking, drinking, eating, and philandering.






There is also the small matter of evidence for the existence of these other universes. Are they in fact physically real? Everett, an atheist and a materialist, was as little inclined to metaphysics as his nemesis Bohr, though for different reasons. When cornered on this point by a sympathetic Defense Department colleague in 1959 though, he allowed "a 70 percent probability" that the multitude of universes are all real.


Peter Byrne's book tells us everything essential, and is altogether a fine work of investigative biography. He has trawled through stacks of boxes in Everett's son's basement, and spoken to as many associates and acquaintances of Everett as he could find. His explanations of QM are more lucid than the average.

It is a shame that OUP, like every other publisher, has now got out of the editing business, so that we are insulted with "criteria" as a single noun, "lay" for "lie," "ex-patrioted" for "expatriate," and other gross infelicities of grammar and usage. I wish, too, that Byrne had done less editorializing on behalf of his New Left opinions about feminism, militarism, the "culture of consumerism," and the rest — all very bold in 1957, but drearily conformist nowadays. These minor irritations aside, though, I found this book a well-researched and worthwhile read.