Miscellaneous

  1. Paul Ree, All Too Human
  2. Worlds without End: the Unsettling Cosmological Model of Hugh Everett III, ‘48

Worlds without End: the Unsettling Cosmological Model of Hugh Everett III, ‘48

By Michael F. Duggan, Ph.D.

St. John’s College High School can claim as one of its own a thinker who has been favorably compared to Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein1, putting him into the rarefied company of the handful of Western thinkers who have formulated the basis for an original cosmological model. In this sense, Hugh Everett may prove to be in the same league as Plato, Augustine, Leibniz, Kant, and some of the Pre-Socratic Greeks.                                                                                 Everett is sometimes depicted as an imperfect, even troubled person with an unhappy family life, but then the significance of great great thinkers lays in the power and importance of their ideas –their insights—rather than in the successes and failures of their private lives. Hugh Everett’s disquieting ideas may well change our understanding of the fundamental nature of the physical universe, or universes.

Life

The bare outline of Everett’s relatively short life is straightforward: he was a brilliant student who devised a revolutionary theory in physics that was largely ignored by his contemporaries. Failing to make a career in physics, he became a defense analyst, advisor, and contractor. He had two children, a son named Mark (the lead singer for the rock group Eels) and a daughter, Elizabeth, who died in 1996. Everett himself died on August 19, 1982 at the age of 51.

Hugh Everett III was born on November 11, 1930 and grew up in Washington D.C. His father was an army officer who served in General Mark C. Clark’s Italian Campaign during WWII. His parents divorced when he was a child. At the age of 12, he wrote to Albert Einstein asking what force held the world together, a query to which the great physicist actually replied. Everett attended St. John’s on a half-scholarship before going on to Catholic University where he majored in Chemical Engineering, graduating in 1953.

Everett went to Princeton University for graduate school—again thanks to a scholarship—initially majoring in mathematics, and studied game theory under Albert W. Tucker, who had previously advised the mathematician, John Nash, the subject of A Beautiful Mind. He began taking courses in physics including Robert Dicke’s introduction to quantum mechanics, and supposedly came up with his revolutionary idea while drinking sherry with friends in 1954.2 While working on the dissertation that would form the basis for his subsequent if belated fame, Everett was advised by the great physicist, John Wheeler. On March 1, 1957, Everett submitted his 36-page dissertation under the title “The Theory of Universal Wave Function”, which was accepted by his committee the following month. In July of that year, it was published in Reviews of Modern Physics as “Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics.”                                                                                                                                                Even before the dissertation was accepted by Princeton, Wheeler traveled to Copenhagen and presented it to Neils Bohr and Alexander W. Stern. 3 In spite of the fact that the paper provided a productive—even transformative—model, it failed to win favor, and the career Everett sought in physics was not forthcoming. In June 1956, the year before he received his doctorate, Everett landed a job in the Pentagon’s Weapon Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG) in the Institute of Defense Analyses and the following year he became Director of the Institute’s Department of Physical and Mathematical Sciences.

Everett’s subsequent career is illustrative of the technical cutting edge of the United States cold war defense establishment. As Peter Byrne notes, his first project for the Pentagon was “calculating potential morality rates from radioactive fallout in a nuclear war” as well as targeting strategies for using the hydrogen bomb.4 He was also instrumental in the WSEG No. 50 report on nuclear strategy that included the idea of Mutual Assured Destruction (or MAD).5 Over the following decades, he would help found two defense companies including the Lambda Corporation in 1964 which specialized in strategic modeling and predictive systems based on Bayesian probability, and the data-processing company DBS in 1973.

Quantum Mechanics and the “Many Worlds” Theory

What is Hugh Everett’s theory and why is it so controversial, even disturbing? Those of us who study or dabble in science and cosmology become used to the fact that the real nature of the world is very different from how we perceive it, and therefore many true theories are also counterintuitive, sometimes shockingly so. We have become acclimated to the undirected order of evolution by natural selection or the fact that time and space are relative while the speed of light is fixed and universal. Even Einstein found the apparent randomness and probability of quantum mechanics difficult to reconcile with his elegant, deterministic view of the universe. But even those who have long accepted the fact that our unaided senses give us a distorted picture of the world around us, may still find Everett’s model to be at the very least unsettling, and perhaps unfathomably boggling and horrifying in the implications of its expansive inelegance.

The classical physics of the Newtonian model and Einstein’s General Relativity, characterize events of the macroscopic world as having mechanical causes governed by knowable, deterministic laws. At the smallest levels of physical reality however, very strange things happen. Here we find that the familiar causal rules of the clunky, predictable, and fundamentally misleading Newtonian world of everyday objects breaks down into a world of fields, waves, and primary particles seemingly governed by probability, statistical mechanics, and frequency ratios. Rather than a rational, causal world characterized by Newton’s Principia, it is a world more reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. Here individual particles exist in more than one state or location at a single time (this is called superposition, and the quantum menu “of all the possible configurations of a superposed quantum system” 6 is known as its wave function)—that is until they are observed or otherwise interacted with and become fixed through an asserted rule-of-thumb called wave function collapse.7 But as we all know, objects at the macroscopic level only exist in a single place at the same time. Or do they?

The fact that we know of quantum mechanics at all means that the micro and macro levels of the universe do interact even though they seem to be guided by different sets of rules—laws postulating fundamentally different, even mutually exclusive, kinds of universes.8 In 1935 Irwin Schrodinger devised a famous thought experiment that illustrates the apparently absurd implications of applying quantum mechanics on our level of existence.9

The experiment goes like this: a cat is put into an airtight box with a vile of poisonous gas that at a certain point will either be released or not by a valve controlled by and dependent on the superposition of particles of a decaying radioactive element—i.e. by particles that exist in more than one state at the same time. According to quantum mechanics, at the moment of release/non-release, the cat—unobserved in the box—would be simultaneously both dead and alive until it is observed.10

As suggestive as this experiment is, the question remains: are physical processes at the macro level directly influenced by the very strange behavior of the smallest reaches, and are they subject to the same laws? The answer appears to be yes, even though they seem to be guided by fundamentally different sets of laws. As physicist Max Tegmark notes, scientists have recently created conditions where objects above the level of decoherence have had multiple simultaneous existences by isolating them from interaction with other particles.11                                                            It should also be noted that although quantum mechanics may be counterintuitive, much of the modern world, including the solid-state technologies of electronics and computers, is based on it, and is, in fact, one of the most rigorously tested ideas in the history of science. The computer I am writing this on is based on principles of quantum mechanics and to reject them would be to deny the existence of much of our world in the same sense that to deny the counterintuitive truth of Relativity and the equation E= MC2 would be to deny the existence of nuclear power or the facts that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by atomic bombs at the end of The Second World War.

But why does one outcome happen over the other possibilities of the quantum menu? The original interpretation of quantum mechanics formulated by Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg,12 John von Neumann, and Irwin Schrodinger, and is known as the Copenhagen Interpretation. This view asserts that wave function collapse is based on probability therefore positing an “open universe” of indeterminacy, random events, and thus genuine novelty.

This is where Everett comes in. Where other physicists had tried to understand quantum mechanics in terms of classical physics, Everett assumed the opposite: that the laws which govern the quantum world (and which are made predictable through Schrodinger’s theorem), also apply to the macroscopic world. Significantly, Everett approached quantum mechanics from mathematics (rather than from intuition) and postulated the assumption that wave function collapse—which was an assertion used to make sense of observed phenomena—does not in fact exist.13 What follows as a consequence of these assumptions—and not as a premise14—is a model in which every possibility happens, thus preserving determinism via what can be characterized as the ultimate deterministic theory. In this model each quantum event potentially creates a diverging reality—a separate universe—although an observer would only be aware of a single outcome: the outcome that occurs in the same track or fork as the observer.                                In other words, according to the most common interpretation of Everett’s model, at each moment of the day the universe we perceive is constantly branching out into a countless number of other universes as every possibility plays out, even though we are only aware of one and therefore the appearance of a random or probabilistic outcome in each instance of what appears to be particle wave function collapse. The implication is that there are multiple universes on the order of uncounted trillions, many of which are nearly identical to this one and some that are vastly different. Every possible outcome will play out and therefore every possible universe will eventually exist. If this theory is true, then there is a universe in which every reader of this article may live to be the oldest person in the world, and a much larger number of universes where he or she will not.

At the very least, this is a busy and inelegant theory, but then the truth or falsity of theories of physical reality is hardly bound by human standards of simplicity or aesthetics. The relevant question is: is it a true theory?

For those of us who—like Newton, Leibniz, Einstein, and Stephen Hawking—yearn for a singular world governed by a single set of rules that is beautiful in its classical simplicity and elegance, it is difficult to warm up to Everett’s multiverse. For those—like Charles Sanders Peirce, Werner Heisenberg, and Karl Popper—who embrace the idea of a creative and capricious open universe model that includes random events and perhaps free will, Everett’s world(s) is also unappealing.                                                                                                                                              As with his theory and resulting model, Everett himself cuts an uncomfortable historical figure who is also at times difficult to like. A first-rate education transforms students into truth-seekers, and St. Johns is certainly a good school. Even if Everett’s model is eventually shown to be untrue (along with such important ideas as the Ptolemaic model of the universe, Newtonian physics, and Linus Pauling’s single helix model in genetics), it will still be a bold and important concept in the history of ideas—arguably the biggest idea in history. If it is true, we will have to acknowledge it as such with unflinching courage and honesty, because it is important to admit the importance of great thinkers and their ideas, even when they challenge our beliefs and make us uncomfortable.

Notes

  1. Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 195, 2014.
  2. Peter Byrne, “The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett”, Scientific American, December 2007 (online version, October 21, 2008).
  3. Byrne
  4. Byrne [Quote]
  5. Byrne [MAD]
  6. Byrne [wave function]
  7. Byrne [wave function collapse] The equation that allows scientists to predict the future state of a wave function was devised by the Austrian physicist, Erwin Schrodinger in 1926, and is called Schrodinger’s Theorem. Tegmark 175-179.
  8. Both relativity and quantum mechanics are 100% accurate in terms of predictive calculations in their respective spheres, and yet they cannot be used in conjunction—thus the search for a unified field theory or “Theory of Everything” sometimes abbreviated as “TOE”.                                                                                                 Relativity—which charcterizes mechanics at the macro-levels of the universe—assumes a seamless space-time continuum that allows for continuous motion; quantum mechanics assumes a discrete universe in which time is an imperceptible sequence individual frames, like those of a motion picture, and therefore motion is a series of “leaps” from one to the next (recalling Zeno’s Paradox), but which appears to be continuous motion. Relativity is a determinist model, where the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics assumes the existence of random events, at least at the level of particles.
  9. Einstein devised a similar thought experiment before Schrodinger. Walter Isaacson, Einstein, His Life and Universe, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007, p. 456.
  10. Max Tegmark provides his own version of an experiment illustrating the implications of quantum mechanics at the macroscopic level using playing cards and in which no animals are harmed, even by implication. Tegmark, pp. 191-194.
  11. Decoherence has to do with the interaction of a particle with other particles rather than subjective observation (as it is sometimes assumed) other than the fact that observation requires the interaction of a particle and the larger world. Tegmark, p. 199-200.
  12. Heisenberg was the first to describe the paradox of indeterminacy or the fact that the more that is known about the location of a particle, the less that is known of its velocity and vice versa.
  13. Tegmark, p. 195.
  14. Tegmark, p. 187. It is significant that the “many worlds” is the result of Everett’s math and logic rather than a starting point or premise, as is often assumed. The “many worlds” conclusion is just that—an unintended consequence or conclusion.

By Michael F. Duggan, Ph.D.

St. John’s College High School can claim as one of its own a thinker who has been favorably compared to Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein1, putting him into the rarefied company of the handful of Western thinkers who have formulated the basis for an original cosmological model. In this sense, Hugh Everett may prove to be in the same league as Plato, Augustine, Leibniz, Kant, and some of the Pre-Socratic Greeks.                                                                                 Everett is sometimes depicted as an imperfect, even troubled person with an unhappy family life, but then the significance of great great thinkers lays in the power and importance of their ideas –their insights—rather than in the successes and failures of their private lives. Hugh Everett’s disquieting ideas may well change our understanding of the fundamental nature of the physical universe, or universes.

Life

The bare outline of Everett’s relatively short life is straightforward: he was a brilliant student who devised a revolutionary theory in physics that was largely ignored by his contemporaries. Failing to make a career in physics, he became a defense analyst, advisor, and contractor. He had two children, a son named Mark (the lead singer for the rock group Eels) and a daughter, Elizabeth, who died in 1996. Everett himself died on August 19, 1982 at the age of 51.

Hugh Everett III was born on November 11, 1930 and grew up in Washington D.C. His father was an army officer who served in General Mark C. Clark’s Italian Campaign during WWII. His parents divorced when he was a child. At the age of 12, he wrote to Albert Einstein asking what force held the world together, a query to which the great physicist actually replied. Everett attended St. John’s on a half-scholarship before going on to Catholic University where he majored in Chemical Engineering, graduating in 1953.

Everett went to Princeton University for graduate school—again thanks to a scholarship—initially majoring in mathematics, and studied game theory under Albert W. Tucker, who had previously advised the mathematician, John Nash, the subject of A Beautiful Mind. He began taking courses in physics including Robert Dicke’s introduction to quantum mechanics, and supposedly came up with his revolutionary idea while drinking sherry with friends in 1954.2 While working on the dissertation that would form the basis for his subsequent if belated fame, Everett was advised by the great physicist, John Wheeler. On March 1, 1957, Everett submitted his 36-page dissertation under the title “The Theory of Universal Wave Function”, which was accepted by his committee the following month. In July of that year, it was published in Reviews of Modern Physics as “Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics.”                                                                                                                                                Even before the dissertation was accepted by Princeton, Wheeler traveled to Copenhagen and presented it to Neils Bohr and Alexander W. Stern. 3 In spite of the fact that the paper provided a productive—even transformative—model, it failed to win favor, and the career Everett sought in physics was not forthcoming. In June 1956, the year before he received his doctorate, Everett landed a job in the Pentagon’s Weapon Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG) in the Institute of Defense Analyses and the following year he became Director of the Institute’s Department of Physical and Mathematical Sciences.

Everett’s subsequent career is illustrative of the technical cutting edge of the United States cold war defense establishment. As Peter Byrne notes, his first project for the Pentagon was “calculating potential morality rates from radioactive fallout in a nuclear war” as well as targeting strategies for using the hydrogen bomb.4 He was also instrumental in the WSEG No. 50 report on nuclear strategy that included the idea of Mutual Assured Destruction (or MAD).5 Over the following decades, he would help found two defense companies including the Lambda Corporation in 1964 which specialized in strategic modeling and predictive systems based on Bayesian probability, and the data-processing company DBS in 1973.

Quantum Mechanics and the “Many Worlds” Theory

What is Hugh Everett’s theory and why is it so controversial, even disturbing? Those of us who study or dabble in science and cosmology become used to the fact that the real nature of the world is very different from how we perceive it, and therefore many true theories are also counterintuitive, sometimes shockingly so. We have become acclimated to the undirected order of evolution by natural selection or the fact that time and space are relative while the speed of light is fixed and universal. Even Einstein found the apparent randomness and probability of quantum mechanics difficult to reconcile with his elegant, deterministic view of the universe. But even those who have long accepted the fact that our unaided senses give us a distorted picture of the world around us, may still find Everett’s model to be at the very least unsettling, and perhaps unfathomably boggling and horrifying in the implications of its expansive inelegance.

The classical physics of the Newtonian model and Einstein’s General Relativity, characterize events of the macroscopic world as having mechanical causes governed by knowable, deterministic laws. At the smallest levels of physical reality however, very strange things happen. Here we find that the familiar causal rules of the clunky, predictable, and fundamentally misleading Newtonian world of everyday objects breaks down into a world of fields, waves, and primary particles seemingly governed by probability, statistical mechanics, and frequency ratios. Rather than a rational, causal world characterized by Newton’s Principia, it is a world more reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. Here individual particles exist in more than one state or location at a single time (this is called superposition, and the quantum menu “of all the possible configurations of a superposed quantum system” 6 is known as its wave function)—that is until they are observed or otherwise interacted with and become fixed through an asserted rule-of-thumb called wave function collapse.7 But as we all know, objects at the macroscopic level only exist in a single place at the same time. Or do they?

The fact that we know of quantum mechanics at all means that the micro and macro levels of the universe do interact even though they seem to be guided by different sets of rules—laws postulating fundamentally different, even mutually exclusive, kinds of universes.8 In 1935 Irwin Schrodinger devised a famous thought experiment that illustrates the apparently absurd implications of applying quantum mechanics on our level of existence.9

The experiment goes like this: a cat is put into an airtight box with a vile of poisonous gas that at a certain point will either be released or not by a valve controlled by and dependent on the superposition of particles of a decaying radioactive element—i.e. by particles that exist in more than one state at the same time. According to quantum mechanics, at the moment of release/non-release, the cat—unobserved in the box—would be simultaneously both dead and alive until it is observed.10

As suggestive as this experiment is, the question remains: are physical processes at the macro level directly influenced by the very strange behavior of the smallest reaches, and are they subject to the same laws? The answer appears to be yes, even though they seem to be guided by fundamentally different sets of laws. As physicist Max Tegmark notes, scientists have recently created conditions where objects above the level of decoherence have had multiple simultaneous existences by isolating them from interaction with other particles.11                                                            It should also be noted that although quantum mechanics may be counterintuitive, much of the modern world, including the solid-state technologies of electronics and computers, is based on it, and is, in fact, one of the most rigorously tested ideas in the history of science. The computer I am writing this on is based on principles of quantum mechanics and to reject them would be to deny the existence of much of our world in the same sense that to deny the counterintuitive truth of Relativity and the equation E= MC2 would be to deny the existence of nuclear power or the facts that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by atomic bombs at the end of The Second World War.

But why does one outcome happen over the other possibilities of the quantum menu? The original interpretation of quantum mechanics formulated by Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg,12 John von Neumann, and Irwin Schrodinger, and is known as the Copenhagen Interpretation. This view asserts that wave function collapse is based on probability therefore positing an “open universe” of indeterminacy, random events, and thus genuine novelty.

This is where Everett comes in. Where other physicists had tried to understand quantum mechanics in terms of classical physics, Everett assumed the opposite: that the laws which govern the quantum world (and which are made predictable through Schrodinger’s theorem), also apply to the macroscopic world. Significantly, Everett approached quantum mechanics from mathematics (rather than from intuition) and postulated the assumption that wave function collapse—which was an assertion used to make sense of observed phenomena—does not in fact exist.13 What follows as a consequence of these assumptions—and not as a premise14—is a model in which every possibility happens, thus preserving determinism via what can be characterized as the ultimate deterministic theory. In this model each quantum event potentially creates a diverging reality—a separate universe—although an observer would only be aware of a single outcome: the outcome that occurs in the same track or fork as the observer.                                In other words, according to the most common interpretation of Everett’s model, at each moment of the day the universe we perceive is constantly branching out into a countless number of other universes as every possibility plays out, even though we are only aware of one and therefore the appearance of a random or probabilistic outcome in each instance of what appears to be particle wave function collapse. The implication is that there are multiple universes on the order of uncounted trillions, many of which are nearly identical to this one and some that are vastly different. Every possible outcome will play out and therefore every possible universe will eventually exist. If this theory is true, then there is a universe in which every reader of this article may live to be the oldest person in the world, and a much larger number of universes where he or she will not.

At the very least, this is a busy and inelegant theory, but then the truth or falsity of theories of physical reality is hardly bound by human standards of simplicity or aesthetics. The relevant question is: is it a true theory?

For those of us who—like Newton, Leibniz, Einstein, and Stephen Hawking—yearn for a singular world governed by a single set of rules that is beautiful in its classical simplicity and elegance, it is difficult to warm up to Everett’s multiverse. For those—like Charles Sanders Peirce, Werner Heisenberg, and Karl Popper—who embrace the idea of a creative and capricious open universe model that includes random events and perhaps free will, Everett’s world(s) is also unappealing.                                                                                                                                              As with his theory and resulting model, Everett himself cuts an uncomfortable historical figure who is also at times difficult to like. A first-rate education transforms students into truth-seekers, and St. Johns is certainly a good school. Even if Everett’s model is eventually shown to be untrue (along with such important ideas as the Ptolemaic model of the universe, Newtonian physics, and Linus Pauling’s single helix model in genetics), it will still be a bold and important concept in the history of ideas—arguably the biggest idea in history. If it is true, we will have to acknowledge it as such with unflinching courage and honesty, because it is important to admit the importance of great thinkers and their ideas, even when they challenge our beliefs and make us uncomfortable.

Notes

  1. Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 195, 2014.
  2. Peter Byrne, “The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett”, Scientific American, December 2007 (online version, October 21, 2008).
  3. Byrne
  4. Byrne [Quote]
  5. Byrne [MAD]
  6. Byrne [wave function]
  7. Byrne [wave function collapse] The equation that allows scientists to predict the future state of a wave function was devised by the Austrian physicist, Erwin Schrodinger in 1926, and is called Schrodinger’s Theorem. Tegmark 175-179.
  8. Both relativity and quantum mechanics are 100% accurate in terms of predictive calculations in their respective spheres, and yet they cannot be used in conjunction—thus the search for a unified field theory or “Theory of Everything” sometimes abbreviated as “TOE”.                                                                                                 Relativity—which charcterizes mechanics at the macro-levels of the universe—assumes a seamless space-time continuum that allows for continuous motion; quantum mechanics assumes a discrete universe in which time is an imperceptible sequence individual frames, like those of a motion picture, and therefore motion is a series of “leaps” from one to the next (recalling Zeno’s Paradox), but which appears to be continuous motion. Relativity is a determinist model, where the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics assumes the existence of random events, at least at the level of particles.
  9. Einstein devised a similar thought experiment before Schrodinger. Walter Isaacson, Einstein, His Life and Universe, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007, p. 456.
  10. Max Tegmark provides his own version of an experiment illustrating the implications of quantum mechanics at the macroscopic level using playing cards and in which no animals are harmed, even by implication. Tegmark, pp. 191-194.
  11. Decoherence has to do with the interaction of a particle with other particles rather than subjective observation (as it is sometimes assumed) other than the fact that observation requires the interaction of a particle and the larger world. Tegmark, p. 199-200.
  12. Heisenberg was the first to describe the paradox of indeterminacy or the fact that the more that is known about the location of a particle, the less that is known of its velocity and vice versa.
  13. Tegmark, p. 195.
  14. Tegmark, p. 187. It is significant that the “many worlds” is the result of Everett’s math and logic rather than a starting point or premise, as is often assumed. The “many worlds” conclusion is just that—an unintended consequence or conclusion.Worlds without End: the Unsettling Cosmological Model of Hugh Everett, ‘48By Michael F. Duggan, Ph.D.As the Class of 1948 prepares to celebrate its 70th anniversary, it is only fitting to recognize the physicist and class member, Hugh Everett, III. For while captains of industry and athletes may inspire our admiration in areas of narrow endeavor, great physicists and cosmologists literally change the way we see everything. The notable bankers and athletes of Ancient Greece and Roman mostly molder in obscurity, but many of their most important thinkers and their ideas are still well-known to us. Quite simply, if Everett’s “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics turns out to be true, he will likely find a place in the pantheon of ideas alongside the likes of Parmenides, Plato, Newton, Leibniz, and Einstein.The bare outline of Everett’s relatively short life is straightforward: he was a brilliant student who devised a theory in physics that led to an extraordinary model of the universe which was largely ignored by his contemporaries. Failing to make a career in physics, he became a defense analyst, advisor, and contractor. He had two children, a son named Mark (the lead singer for the rock group Eels), and a daughter, Elizabeth, who died in 1996. Everett himself died on August 19, 1982 at the age of 51.

    He was born on November 11, 1930 and grew up in Washington, D.C. His father was an army officer who served in General Mark C. Clark’s Italian campaign during World War II. At the age of twelve, he wrote to Albert Einstein asking what force held the world together, a query to which the great physicist replied. Everett attended St. John’s on a half-scholarship before going on to Catholic University where he majored in Chemical Engineering and graduated in 1953.

    Everett went on to graduate school at Princeton University—again thanks to a scholarship—initially majoring in mathematics, and studied game theory under Albert W. Tucker, who had also advised the great mathematician, John Nash, the subject of A Beautiful Mind, a number of years earlier. He then began taking courses in physics including Robert Dicke’s introduction to quantum mechanics, and is supposed to have come up with his revolutionary idea whole drinking sherry. While working on the dissertation that would form the basis for his subsequent, if belated, fame, Everett studied under the great physicist, John Wheeler On March 1, 1957, Everett submitted his 36 page dissertation under the title “The Theory of Universal Wave Function”. In July of that year, it was published in Review of Modern Physics as “Relative State Formation of Quantum Mechanics”.

    Before the dissertation was accepted by Princeton, Wheeler traveled to Copenhagen and presented it to Neils Bohr, one of the founders of the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. In spite of the fact that the paper provided a productive—even transformative—model with great explanatory power, it failed to win favor, and the career Everett sought in physics was not forthcoming. Even before graduating, Everett landed a job in the Pentagon’s Weapon Systems Evaluation Groups (WSEG) in the Institute of Defense Analyses and the following year he became director of the Institute’s Department of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. Everett’s Subsequent career is illustrative of the technical and strategic cutting edge of the U.S. Cold War defense establishment, and he would eventually found two defense companies.

    What is Everett’s great idea and why is it so controversial, even shocking? Physics is dominated by two outlooks, two worldviews: one is determinism, in which every event necessarily follows from and is guided by fundamental laws. This outlook includes the classical models of the universe like Einstein’s General and Special Relativity. The other outlook is indeterminism, in which random events occur that follow probabilistic laws. The branch of physics that deals with the behavior of particles and energy at the smallest scales of the universe is called quantum mechanics and assumes that some events are random. At least it did before Everett’s theory.

    Everett’s idea simply states that wavefunction collapse does not occur, but the implications of this simple, if technical, statement are staggering, and it is useful to try to visualize them through analogy and imagery. Imagine, for instance, a tree that branches out into seemingly endless offshoots of its limbs and branches. Now imagine that each limb, each branch, each twig, is an independent track of the entire universe—a parallel universe—and that each split is cause by a probabilistic event like the flipping of a coin or the leap of an electron to another orbit.

    Another way of illustrating this idea would be to say that with every roll of a die, all six possibilities come up each time, but we are only aware of a single outcome, and every other outcome creates with it a diverging reality—an entire universe of which we are as wholly unaware as our counterparts in the other universes are of ours. In other words, every possibility will eventually play out and therefore every possible universe will eventually exist.

    In other words, according to the most common interpretation of Everett’s model, at every moment of every day, the observable universe is continuously branching out into a countless number of other universes as every possibility plays out, even though we are only aware of one, and therefore the appearance of a random or probabilistic outcome in each instance remains intact. The implication is that there may be multiple universes perhaps on the order of uncounted trillions of trillions, many of which are nearly identical to this one and some that are vastly different. Every possible outcome will play out and therefore every possible universe will eventually exist. If this theory is true, then there is a universe in which every reader of this article may live to be the oldest person in the world, and a much larger number of universes where he or she will not.

    At first glance, this seems to be an overwhelmingly busy and inelegant theory, but then the truth or falsity of a theory of a theory is hardly bound by human aesthetic standards of simplicity and elegance. The relevant question is: is it a true theory? In the decades since his death, an increasing number of physicists have been answering “yes”.

    For those who yearn for a world governed by a single set of rules that is beautiful in its classical simplicity, it is difficult to warm up to Everett’s multiverse. For those who embrace the idea of a creative “open” universe that includes random events and perhaps free will, Everett’s view is also unsettling.

    A first rate education teaches students how to think, helping transform them into truth seekers, and St, John’s is a good school. If Everett’s model proves to be true (although proving it may be difficult), it will transform our understanding of the world as few ideas have. But even if it can somehow be shown to be untrue (along with the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, Newtonian Physics, and Linus Palling’s single helix model in genetics), it will still be regarded as a bold and important concept in the history of ideas—arguably the biggest idea in history. If it is true, we will have to acknowledge its as such with the unflinching courage and honesty, because it is important to admit the importance of important ideas, even when they challenge our beliefs and make us uncomfortable.