This programme contains some strong language.
# 22 miles of hard road 33 years of tough love
# 44 skulls buried in the ground
# Crawl down through the mud Ah yeah. #
That's my train. I've gotta go.
On to the next fantastic voyage into my father's brain.
Have you seen my dad's brain around here?
Your dad's theory is one of the most important discoveries of all time in science.
I'd put it right up there with Einstein's relativity theory,
Newton's theory of gravity.
There really are very large numbers of versions of you that really exist.
Now you're blowing my mind. Good.
# Ah yeah. #
Hello. Nice to see you.
Mark Oliver Everett, known to his friends as E,
is the creative force behind the successful cult rock band, Eels,
who, over the last decade, have been earning critical kudos,
a shelf load of music awards,
and have even popped up on the soundtrack of the hit movie Shrek.
# There's nothing that I wanna do
# More than get alone And be with you
# Trouble with dreams Is they don't come true
# And when they do They can catch up to you... #
But what many of Mark's fans don't know is that his father, Hugh Everett,
was a brilliant quantum mechanic.
He developed the ground-breaking theory of parallel universes.
A scientific theory that has seeped into the worlds of film,
music and literature and is part of our everyday vocabulary.
I don't remember knowing, when he was alive,
that he was a famous physicist.
I don't know if I ever even knew that till after he died.
Dad!
Mom!
Can you hear me?
My dad, who was a devout atheist, of course,
his dying wish was to be thrown out in the trash.
And my mom kept his ashes in a filing cabinet
in the dining room at our house for a few years
and then eventually, honoured his wish and threw him in the trash.
That's the truth!
Here's my mom. This is the one. I've never seen it before.
It was something she wanted me to take care of after she died.
Oh, there's one for my sister, too.
I've never seen that.
Wait... where's my father's stone?
I just don't get it. It's a mystery.
Mark's father was a distracted genius, lost in his own world.
They lived in the same house for 20 years, yet they barely spoke.
In fact, one of Mark's lingering memories of his father
was a distressing day in July, 1982.
It was the weirdest thing because I walked in their bedroom
and there he was, laying there,
like sideways on the bed, fully clothed with his tie on,
like he always had on.
I tried to wake him up and when I put my arms under him and I picked him up,
his body was completely stiff.
And it was just so surreal because I was touching him,
which is the only time I could remember having any physical contact with him.
And it was just all so, so...
Obviously, it was very traumatic, and a horrific scene,
but it was also, had the added surreal quality for me because...
.. you know, my father had just died, but I barely knew him,
so it was hard to know how to feel,
like a normal person would feel, in that situation.
I guess it's pretty sad
that the one really intimate experience I had with him
was while he was dead, you know?
# I don't leave the house much
# I don't like being around people
# It's better for me to stay home
# Some might think it means I hate people
# But that's not quite right... #
Mark fiercely guards his privacy
but he's opening himself up to confront something that, until now,
he's only been able to deal with in his lyrics.
It's been almost the exclusive way that I've dealt with my situation,
writing a song about my family.
He wants to find out why a scientist as outstanding as his father,
turned his back on academia's glittering prizes.
I'm gonna go on this trip, because it's something...
.. that I knew was coming eventually.
I didn't wanna wait too long either, you know,
with my family history, the longevity rate there!
HE LAUGHS
You have to have a sense of humour.
That came from my family. That was how we communicated.
Nobody said "I love you".
It was a very, kind of, jokey, sarcastic family.
That was how we communicated.
What have we got here?
This is Bobby's room, yeah.
I mean, how many dogs get their own room?
He's the most spoilt dog in Los Feliz, maybe in the world.
MARK PLAYS KEYBOARD, DOG HOWLS
Understanding how his father came up with the concept of parallel universes will be tricky
because science was never Mark's strong point.
I only have a very, very vague understanding of my father's theory.
It gets up to a certain point and it becomes, like, impenetrable.
And then it gets into the scientist language which is like blah-blah.
It's like a different alphabet they are using, practically.
Hugh Everett's theory was so original
that it set him on a collision course with the most brilliant minds of the physics world.
According to Mark's father, with every choice and decision we make,
with every event in our life that could happen in more ways than one,
universes branch off in different directions.
Every time we make a decision,
we divide into two different versions of ourselves.
This is how parallel universes are born.
Applying the theory to Mark, he splits in two at the very moment
he decides to go on his trip.
In another parallel universe, a version of himself stays at home in LA,
while in this universe, Mark sets off.
# Blinking lights on the airplane wings
# Up above the trees... #
Mark's father, Hugh Everett III,
was born in 1930, on the east coast of America,
the only child of a strict, military family.
But while other kids were busying themselves with marbles and skipping ropes,
12-year-old Hugh was penning fan letters to his idol, Albert Einstein.
# Set me on the ground Once more again. #
Like his father, Mark grew up in the stiflingly rigid confines
of American suburbia in Virginia, just outside Washington, DC.
Still living in the area is Don Reisler -
physicist, work colleague and friend of his father's.
Mark can only just remember Don from childhood
and wants to ask him what his estranged father was really like.
THEY LAUGH
Hello, Mark! You dressed for me.
Absolutely. Who could turn down this opportunity?
I mean, how often does a rock star come to my house?
It's good to see you. Hey, it's delightful to see you. How long's it been, 25 years?
25 years!
You are now so old, that you are the age I was when you last saw me.
Really?! Wow, you guys are always doing the math.
Always doing strange stuff, yeah.
So, come in... Thanks.
And be comfortable.
There's a bathroom there if you need,
fluids here... we can sit down. Great.
When did you first meet my father?
Um... 1970.
It was a job interview.
And he very timidly -
I know that's not what you think of -
but very, very timidly said,
"Have you by any chance seen my paper on quantum mechanics?"
Mmm, that day?
That day, yeah.
And I said, "Oh, my God, you're THAT Hugh Everett!"
Cos I had seen it, and thought it was the work of a raving lunatic.
And told him. You said that?
And he thought it was very funny.
And so, we knew we could enjoy each other.
Wow. Even though he was a constant physical presence,
he's really a complete mystery as a person to me.
What was he like?
That's what I don't really know.
Um... he was peculiar
and a bit eccentric.
He was a very good friend to me, in his way.
I will show you something...
that... friendship and contrast.
You have here...
Wow, he's outside. This would have been late '70s.
That's basically what he was wearing every day and every night
at the dinning room table, as well.
That was his uniform.
The only thing you guys have in common is facial hair.
Yeah. And otherwise, you look like completely different...
Species. City guy and mountain guy.
And yet, we were really good friends.
Don is an expert in quantum mechanics
and starts Mark off nice and easy on his quest to understand his father's theory.
All you need is a pencil.
If I take a pencil and I cut it in half,
and cut it in half, and cut it in half,
and just get ever, ever smaller pieces,
at some point I may run out of something I can cut in half.
You've gotten to the point where the pencil no longer can be subdivided.
You've come to something that's no longer bits of a pencil,
but is something more fundamental and that was the notion of an atom.
Atoms are the buildings blocks of the universe.
Microscopic particles that make up everything we see around us,
from houses and guitars to rock musicians.
They're so small, that there are more atoms in a full stop
than all the pencils in the world.
If you could somehow look inside one of these atoms, you might see what it's made of.
In the middle, is a concentrated ball of material called the nucleus.
Around the nucleus, are tiny particles called electrons.
These electrons spin super-quick around the nucleus.
Now, this is the crazy bit.
The classical laws of physics seem to work fine for everything much bigger than an atom.
For instance, Newton's gravity makes apples go down rather than up.
At an intuitive level, these classical laws make perfect sense.
But the classical laws all break down when it comes to really tiny stuff like atoms.
The electrons don't fly around the nucleus in nice regular orbits,
like planets around the sun,
but instead, they are smeared out around the nucleus,
taking on a cloud-like form.
# What's that flaming ball in the sky? #
And even weirder still, they are everywhere at once.
Welcome to the quantum world.
What do you think about this?
You know, my father, clearly, on top of his game with the mathematics and whatnot.
And I, the furthest I got was I flunked out of the easiest 9th grade algebra class.
I just couldn't grasp it.
Right. I just didn't inherit that gene. Yeah.
Um, I've thought a lot about that.
About how stupid I was in math?
I think I'd have phrased it differently. Did maybe my father speak of it?
No, no. What a disappointment I was?
No, I think... if your father had had the emotional vocabulary,
he would have been very, very pleased with what you did with your music.
# I feel like an old railroad man
# Riding out on the Bluemont line
# Humming along old dominion blues
# Not much to see And not much left to lose
# And I know I can walk Along the tracks
# It may take a little longer
# But I'll know How to find my way back. #
Like Bon Jovi, "Life in a rock band sucks, man.
"On a steel horse I ride, wanted dead or alive. "
Hugh Everett wanted to win a place at Princeton University
to study for a PhD and be close to his hero, Einstein.
A glowing reference from Hugh's professor
confirms that he was already a budding genius.
It says, "This is a once-in-a-lifetime recommendation,
"for I think it most unlikely that I shall ever again encounter a student,
"I can give such complete and unreserved support. "
Yeah, that sounds like a ringing endorsement.
Hugh arrived at Princeton in 1953 at the age of 22.
After a year studying maths, he was persuaded to switch to the far more glamorous quantum mechanics.
The man who was the catalyst was Professor John Wheeler, his new mentor.
Wheeler was keen on a particular experiment.
It's called the double-slit experiment and physics professors love it
because it's the perfect way to demonstrate the weird quantum behaviour of tiny particles.
I'll tell you what nature behaves like
and if you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this,
you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing.
So, that's the way to look at the lectures, not to try to understand.
I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
STUDENTS LAUGH
Mark is going to be shown the double-slit experiment by Yi Ma,
a technician at Princeton's physics department.
You want to see this experiment?
Yeah, lay it on me. OK.
See if you can make me understand quantum physics.
It's a challenge, but I accept it, OK.
What we have here is a black box, but inside, it's rather simple.
Here's a laser.
Is this laser going to blow my eyes out or something?
No, they are very, er... I went to a Who concert in seventh grade and the laser went right in my eyes
and I've had to wear glasses ever since. I see.
Usually, we don't see the laser beam in the air,
so we have a way of showing it.
You see that? Whoa, there it is.
There are many, many little particles, we call photons... What's a photon?
A photon is just a...
It's a... good question, er...
You don't know what a photon is.
I didn't prepare for this question, yes. This is a hard question.
When we say "photons", we always give this mass and the unit and size of it,
because there is no common language
that you can use to describe it... and massless.
So, that's a very difficult.
Wow, I'm sorry I asked.
No, it's a good question, very good question. I didn't mean to put you on the spot.
To oversimplify enormously, photons are tiny particles of light.
Electrons and photons behave similarly and both obey quantum laws.
But because we can actually see photons as light,
they're ideal for this experiment.
From the laser apparatus, single photons fire off one at a time.
The individual particles then arrive at a plastic barrier with two narrow slits.
On the other side is a sensitive TV camera to film where the photons end up.
So, the photons will hit the film. What do you expect?
You expect we'll hit two spots here, like that,
or you expect the photons will go all over the map?
What do you expect? We have two slits here.
The choices are all over the map, or just those two spots? Yeah.
Er...
Just the two spots?
Exactly. Mark is using his common sense.
Imagine this experiment was blown up to a much larger scale,
so that the particles are tennis balls.
And a machine is firing the tennis balls at a barrier with two gaps in it.
Of course, you'd expect to find the balls hitting the back wall
in two places, in line with the two slits.
But when our experiment is done with individual photons from the laser,
something very different happens.
OK, you see the screen up there? Yep.
That's what we see from the camera.
See those individual flashes? Those are the photons.
Each flash of light is actually an individual photon hitting the back wall.
They appear to be landing all over the place.
But watch over time and a pattern emerges.
Can you see somewhere in the middle of the screen? It looks like a smudge.
Yeah, it looks like a smudge.
Those are where the photon hits,
but it's not two as we would expect.
Is that weird?
Yes, so why is that? That's right, why is that?
Instead of the two vertical bands that you'd expect,
a series of vertical smudges appear.
To make sense of this pattern,
you need to look at it from the perspective of a single photon.
This photon is landing in a place on the back wall
that would be physically impossible
if it were travelling straight through just one of the slits.
So, the only explanation is that the particle has gone through both slits simultaneously.
By the time it reaches the back wall,
it has come together again as one photon.
Multiply this single photon 1,000-fold and you have the distinctive pattern that Mark saw.
Think about it, a photon arrives at the slits
in a hell of a quantum state and travels through both.
A single object is in two places at once.
Now you're blowing my mind. Good, that's our job to do.
To blow people's minds, so make you think, right.
My brain hurts.
OK. I wish I was back home playing my guitar.
And it's not just photons that behave like this.
The double slit experiment has been replicated with electrons and with atoms.
But we are made up of atoms, so atoms can be in two places at the same time, why can't we?
One man thought he had the answer,
the godfather of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr.
He'd won the Nobel Prize for his research into the atom.
During World War Two,
Bohr escaped the Nazis and ended up helping the Allies develop the first atomic bomb.
In 1954, he visited Princeton.
While there, he gave a lecture to the students.
By this time, Bohr had overthrown Einstein
as the giant of the physics world.
For a student to challenge him,
he'd have to be very naive or very arrogant.
It could be argued that Hugh Everett was both.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
That's me, and Hale, and this is Niels Bohr.
This photograph was taken just before Bohr's lecture.
The other men pictured are Hugh's fellow students
and they've come back to the college for their own reunion.
Everyone's wearing gowns, that was required in those days. Dinner gowns.
At dinner? Yeah. There was a big fight about them.
Lucky you didn't have to wear the powdered wigs!
They were also convenient for an occasional sneaking-in of a female.
So, what's going on here?
Bohr has come to give a lecture. Yeah, he'd come to give a lecture.
So, this is where talks would be given.
This would be the place where Bohr would have given his talk that evening.
I was sitting over in a soft seat here, and Bohr was sitting about here,
with a group of all the important physicists sitting around, plus Hale, I think.
With their ears going like this.
And I was just snoring over in the corner.
But he was known to talk very slowly and mumble,
never quite finishes his sentences
because he was thinking so deeply about getting everything right.
If Hugh's old pal Harvey had managed to stay awake,
he may have learnt the world according to Bohr.
Bohr proposed that everything be divided into two categories.
Big stuff, like tennis balls, apples falling off trees, obeys the classical laws of physics.
However, small stuff, about the size of atoms, obeys the crazy laws of quantum mechanics.
Bohr didn't stop there.
He described what happens when you look at something very tiny.
At that exact moment, the particle stops behaving so weirdly.
Instead of being in multiple quantum states, once observed, it's in just one state.
It's now a nice, well behaved, little particle.
The whole shebang was called the Copenhagen Interpretation
and thanks to Bohr, became the established view.
Oh, by the way, Copenhagen was Bohr's hometown.
But the young and ambitious Hugh thought it was all most unlikely.
How can just by looking at something affect the very behaviour of a physical object?
Hugh was convinced that Bohr had it wrong and so he decided to start on his own radical theory,
helped, on most evenings, by a sherry or five.
Harvey? Yes, please.
For a while, we had fairly regular sherry meetings before dinner, very cheap sherry.
So, a toast to Hugh.
Great having a chance to...
What are your memories of my father as a person, back then?
He surprised me from the time that I met him until I got to know him,
that he was as brilliant as he was.
It didn't come across until you got close to him.
Do you think he was the smartest guy?
Well, he was smart in a very broad way.
Do you think he thought he was the smartest guy? I think he did, but he didn't broadcast it.
He certainly didn't around our house.
I was not aware that he was a genius physicist,
I don't think, ever, until after he died.
That's interesting.
Which room was my dad's?
It's the room up there with the open window.
Wow, that's like the penthouse.
Did they put the smartest guys up at the top? Is that how it works? Yeah, probably.
Is that the room where he wrote his theory? Yeah, it must have been. That's exciting.
So, what year would this have been when you lived here? '53.
1953. That's right, yeah. '53 to '54.
Just coming into my father's bedroom now.
So, if you lay in the bed in this room,
it's said you'll come up with crazy theories.
This is exciting, like in the music world this would be like going to the Abbey Road Studios, or something.
Interestingly enough, I didn't inherit any of his mathematical genius.
I have trouble adding up the tip at dinner.
I wonder what you feel you understand about your father's theory?
I understand that up to the point of anything that can be happening
is happening somewhere.
The somewhere part is the hard part to wrap my brain around, you know.
I feel like I'm in a science show now.
A meeting with Max Tegmark, top physicist and Hugh devotee,
is set to bend Mark's brain further out of shape.
It's a real honour to get to meet you, because your dad has just been such an inspiration to me.
When I was a grad student in Berkeley,
I found in this old bookstore,
a copy of this 137-page paper that your dad wrote.
And I was like, "Wow!" It suddenly all made sense,
and since then, I've spent many years
working on your dad's theory and various implications of it,
and it's just so cool for me to actually get to meet you here
and to even have a chance to help you understand.
Mark's father wasn't the only one who found Bohr's theory difficult to swallow.
So did the physicist Erwin Schrodinger.
As Schrodinger himself pointed out in a famous article,
there is something really weird
about this idea of dividing the world into two parts
because you are made out of atoms,
so if an atom can be in two places at once, so can you, right?
Schrodinger had devised an experiment to expose this absurdity.
He came up with the most famous feline experiment in science - Schrodinger's cat.
It goes like this...
a cat is penned up in a steel chamber
along with a radioactive substance such as uranium,
a Geiger counter attached to a quick-release hammer,
and a flask of poisonous gas, hydrocyanic acid.
No. Yeah.
He doesn't even have legs and now you're going to poison him?
Don't blame me, blame Schrodinger.
Schrodinger was never diabolical enough to do this for real,
it was just a thought experiment.
At the heart of it all is a quantum event.
Every now and then, completely randomly,
there's a chance of a uranium atom decaying, and emitting radiation.
This radiation is enough to trigger the counter,
that sets off the hammer,
that breaks the vial that poisons the cat.
But if none of the uranium atoms decay over the duration of the experiment, the cat will live.
What's so disturbing about this is,
the fate of a single atom determines the fate of a cat.
According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, until the experiment is observed by peering inside,
the entire contents of the box exists in two possible states.
Each uranium atom both has and has not decayed.
And still further, the poisonous gas has both killed and not killed the cat.
And this is the paradox.
A single cat that is both dead and alive at the same time.
That's what Schrodinger couldn't buy.
And neither could Hugh.
In the winter of 1954, sometime after the Bohr lecture,
fortified by some sherry and chat with Bohr's assistant Aage Petersen,
Hugh came up with the theory of parallel universes.
Hugh argued that everything in the universe, big and small, obeys the laws of quantum mechanics.
And, instead of the observer, Hugh introduced the notion of splitting.
Splitting occurs every time a quantum event happens
and this is how parallel universes are created.
How does my father's theory solve the two different outcomes of the cat experiment?
It says that both outcomes actually happen.
The paradox of Schrodinger's cat
had been that the one cat was both dead and alive at the same time.
Hugh solved the problem with parallel universes.
Two cats existing in separate worlds -
one cat dead, the other alive.
Hugh's theory was visionary and backed up by some serious maths.
He was only 24 years old.
# Some people think you have a problem
# But that problem lies only with them
# Beautiful freak, beautiful freak... #
In my personal opinion,
your dad's theory is one of the most important discoveries of all time in science,
and I just can't emphasise enough how important I think it is.
And I would put it right up there with Einstein's relativity theory,
Newton's theory of gravity and so on and I think, 50 years from now,
he's going to be even more famous than he is now,
when more experiments have confirmed
that this seems to be the way the world works.
I'm starting to understand a lot more now.
Just need to come out here into the nice Princeton air.
Shake my head a little and let it all settle.
And talk to the squirrels. So if one squirrel gets the decayed poison,
and the other squirrel gets the non-decayed poison...
Oh shit, now there's three of them, now I'm really confused.
# Here we go!
# Walk myself down Sycamore Street
# The sun beats down No shoes on my feet... #
Don't use that!
So, this is the archives of Princeton University itself,
over 250 years of the institution's documents are here.
And of course, every dissertation that has been produced, starting in the 1870s,
including your father's 1957 dissertation, which is right down here.
So, um...
"On The Foundations Of Quantum Mechanics. "
I haven't heard that title before.
"Recommended for acceptance by the Department of Physics, March, 1957."
So, this is the opening of the theory.
I actually... the crazy thing is I actually understand it.
This is getting weird because I know what that means now.
What's happening to me?
What Hugh had done was reconfigure
the framework of quantum mechanics
by taking out the need
for an observer that Bohr relied on.
With the hubris of youth,
Hugh hoped that Bohr would recognise his parallel universe theory as a breakthrough.
A validation of his genius.
In the spring of 1959,
Hugh Everett travelled with his wife, Nancy, and young daughter, Liz, to Copenhagen.
Hugh's mentor, John Wheeler, had arranged a meeting between his student and Bohr.
Wheeler was worried and had already made Hugh shorten his research paper
and tone his language down so as not to antagonise the grandmaster.
Even so, the stage was set for a showdown.
This is just a picture of the view from across the street of the Bohr Institute,
as it was when your father was there, talking with Bohr.
Oh, so that's where it happened. That's where it happened, yeah.
This is a picture of the two of us which we believe your father took.
Oh, yeah? Yeah. That's a nice shot.
Yeah.
Mark is seeing Hugh's old college pal, Charlie Misner, again.
They last met at the grad college reunion.
Charlie and his wife, Susannah, were also in Copenhagen in 1959.
Charlie was witness at the make or break meeting with Bohr.
We should have Danish. We are talking about Denmark...
What happened when my father presented his theory to Bohr?
Bohr was deeply involved for decades with a view of quantum mechanics that he had developed
and was essentially totally accepted
throughout the world of thousands of physicists doing it every day
and to expect that on the basis of a one hour talk by a kid,
he was going to totally change his viewpoint, would be unrealistic.
I doubt that there was any striking meeting of minds there.
They just... listened to each other.
Do you think some of it had to do with their egos, maybe? On both sides.
Yeah, each of them was sure
that they had gone over all this in their own minds
and they knew exactly what was the right way to think about it,
and it was very hard to find a way to arrange a meeting of the minds.
So ended one of the great scientific debates of the 20th century.
Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics remained triumphant
and young Everett's new idea was to be ignored.
It must have been incredibly frustrating
to feel like he'd come up with something so ground-breaking
and then just have it brushed under the rug.
Right. Yeah.
It was very sad, yeah.
He was always joking when we were around,
but I sense the joking was like the clown jokes.
The tears of a clown. Yeah.
That's certainly possible.
To me, it'd make sense
why he was this isolated presence in the household,
just sitting there and not really saying much.
I see. Is that right?
I sensed that he was not really happy.
Yeah, I think that he was definitely depressed.
His mother was somewhat bipolar, wasn't she?
Yeah, she spent time in mental hospitals.
And what about your sister?
And my sister, yeah. Was she having, also, depressions?
Yeah, severe.
I think I could sense that Hugh was...
There was a little strain of crazy in the family.
Well, we have it in our family.
My sister committed suicide and Liz also took her own life? Yeah.
You know when Liz committed suicide,
in her suicide note, she wrote that she was going off meet her father
in a parallel universe.
She was a very intelligent girl. It's very sad.
Depression ran in Hugh's family, and the rejection of his theory
must have been a humiliating blow for him.
When Hugh realised the scientific establishment would never accept his brilliant theory,
he left academia for good.
And his theory disappeared into the university archives.
I think I've gotten to a turning point
where I am really glad I'm doing this.
It's getting interesting now.
To the "me" that split off and didn't come on this trip...
you lazy sack of shit!
HE LAUGHS
I really feel propelled by...
the sadness of the tragedy of my father,
not getting the recognition he deserved
because he was just too far ahead of his time, maybe too smart, too soon.
Being too smart, too soon,
he didn't really get a chance to pursue more, I think,
cos he felt like,
"What's the fucking point if no-one's gonna listen to me?"
I'm getting more comfortable with who my father is.
The more I'm learning about him
and the more I feel like I'm getting to know him, the more I like him, you know?
I know... He seems like a good guy to me, overall.
He had his problems, obviously.
He tried pretty hard and in his own weird way,
he's already done more than I've done, in terms of being a father,
so, you know, got to give him that much.
He let me play drums in the house.
That's my train. I've gotta go.
On to the next fantastic voyage into my father's brain.
Gotta go.
Mark has finally summoned the courage to face something he's been putting off for years.
My father died when I was 19, my sister died several years later,
and my mom died soon after she did,
and at that point I had to go out and clean out the family house.
I boxed up a whole bunch of stuff of my father's
and it's all been sitting under my house all these years,
and I've never looked at any of it.
And, you know, it's a painful world to open up.
So, how long have these boxes been here?
They've been here like eight years.
For Hugh Everett's biographer, Peter Byrne,
this is an eagerly anticipated scientific goldmine
but could also provide Mark with some new clues about his father.
Wow, man, this is a really cool basement.
It's a little dusty.
Wow, there's a treasure trove here. Where do you want to start?
Well, why not just work, as they say, linearly, start with the...
That one over there? Yeah.
And then come back and start like looking at the work papers, and work our way that way. OK.
It's another rock'n'roll party Saturday for me.
This is the footnotes to quantum mechanics paper.
This is the kind of stuff I would always see him writing at the dining room table.
It would look like this stuff, which looks like another language.
Yeah, that's linear algebra, it's quantum mechanics.
It's the language that they use for it.
That's a really good photo, man!
He looks bushy-tailed and bright-eyed.
That didn't last long. No-one took him seriously and he lost the fire in his eyes.
How would you like to invent one of the coolest things of all time and have people go, "Er... "?
Happens every time I put an album out!
PETER LAUGHS
Oh, yeah, definitely.
Cool.
This looks like tapes.
Who knows what's on there, man?
That's going to be amazing to listen to that.
Who knows what's on there?
The bad news is I remember dropping his Dictaphone in the tub once
when I was a kid... Really?
And ruining it. But hopefully that's not the same one.
I don't know if I'd recognise his voice, to be honest with you.
Besides the fact that it's been 25 years since he died,
I didn't hear him speak much
in the 18 years or 19 years I lived in the house with him.
It would probably sound weird to me to hear his voice.
Oh, there we go.
Let's see if it works.
DICTAPHONE WHIRRS
That didn't sound good.
It might be the one I dropped in the tub when I was a kid.
For such an important scientist,
archive material of Hugh is surprisingly scarce.
There are very few photographs of him and no known film footage.
These Dictaphone tapes might be the only recording ever made of Hugh's voice.
I think we're shit out of luck on this for today.
I'll get my people on this. OK.
One of my roadies can probably figure this one out.
There's universes in which it worked!
# Hey, man. What? Dig this
# Well, I went walking Out yesterday
# A man was carrying a sign that says
# The world is gonna end tomorrow
# Hey, buddy, got a nickel I can borrow?
# This rotten world's gonna chew you up... #
After the Bohr debacle in the late 1950s,
Hugh was disillusioned with the academic world.
What was a genius quantum mechanic going to do?
Well, it was also the height of the Cold War and the American military
was on a recruiting drive for bright young things. Hugh signed up.
Going to the Pentagon,
which I, again, never saw myself going to in my lifetime.
I don't think I've ever been there,
I don't think Dad ever took me there for Daddy-Son Work Day.
All I remember is that we had a teletype in the basement
that was directly connected to the Pentagon
that was always spitting out all these important messages -
"The world's about to blow up, please wake up. "
# This rotten world gives you what you lack, let's rock... #
At the Weapons System Evaluation Group,
Hugh could avoid the draft and earn a top salary.
He joined some of the brightest minds in the country
in military research.
# This rotten world's gonna chew you up
# Swallow you whole and then spit you back out... #
How the hell did I get clearance?
Amazing.
I'm standing here where generals make speeches.
What kind of kooky world is this?
It also makes you ask,
"How good is the security if they let me in here?"
You know, cos I'm loco.
Right, back to business.
First question. ABC.
One of Hugh's documents has been de-classified.
Called The Radioactive Fallout Project,
it analyses the chilling effects of nuclear war between The Soviet Union and the US.
Hey, George. Oh, hi. Hi. Long time, no see.
Hugh's colleague on this project was nuclear physicist, Dr George Pugh.
I think the last time I remember really meeting you
was a couple of times at your home.
At the time you were busy getting better and better playing the drums.
That's right!
Due to their research, Hugh and George could warn President Eisenhower
that the military had completely underestimated the devastation of World War Three.
Do you think my father had any moral issues working for the government?
You weren't a couple of trigger happy guys
with the fate of the world at your hands?
No, after we briefed Eisenhower,
there was a gradual shift in US policy.
Not to build so many 20-megaton weapons as they were doing
and for God's sakes, not to go to a 100-megaton weapons.
So, you guys really made a positive difference in the world?
I think we really did. Yeah.
It was as darn good thing somebody did what we did. Yeah, I'll say.
But it wasn't all bomb talk.
The fact that his brilliant theory had been banished to the archives
was still close to Hugh's heart.
I think it was ahead of its time.
As a matter of fact, he and I agreed that it was ahead of its time.
Now it's 50 years later, so it was 50 years ahead of its time.
Isn't it amazing that there's a term, "Everettian"?
Yes, I saw that. Some physicists are Everettians, some aren't Everettians.
I might try and get my music fans to call themselves Everettians.
I would like to hear your band some time.
I think you'd like it, it's sort of Everettian rock. Uh-huh.
# Life ain't pretty for a dog-faced boy
# Ma won't shave me Jesus can't save me
# Dog-faced boy... #
Hugh left the Pentagon in 1964,
taking with him a million dollars worth of government contracts.
He became the president of a private company
which pioneered computerised nuclear war games
that would be used by the military for decades to come.
His business grew, and then something unexpected occurred.
# Today is a lovely day to run
# Start up the car with the sun... #
In May 1977, Hugh packed up the family and drove them to Austin.
He'd been invited to give a lecture at the University of Texas.
Things were stirring in the quantum world.
Hugh's theory had started to be referenced in articles and books.
There was a real buzz about parallel universes
amongst a number of young physicists.
He was a kind of star at the conference.
For shy young physicist David Deutsch -
later to become Britain's leading expert on quantum mechanics -
it was a terrific opportunity to learn about the theory from its creator.
He was deferred to, almost. Like a star.
For instance, I seem to remember that he was smoking
and no-one else was allowed to smoke.
Hugh Everett had finally received the recognition he'd always craved.
He seemed to be enjoying the conference.
He seemed to be firing on all six or eight, or however many it was, cylinders
and was impressing everybody with the sharpness of his arguments.
It was the beginning of a roll for the theory of parallel universes.
And soon, it was seeping ever more into popular culture.
Books, television and films
all embraced the concept as a staple plot device.
Now, they had some genuine science to go with their fiction.
But Hugh Everett would see little of this.
Five years after the Texas conference, in 1982,
Hugh died of a heart attack,
exacerbated by his smoking and hard drinking.
He was only 51 years old.
He had worked on his theory for just three years.
The rest of his life had been spent working for the military and in business.
Those little tapes that we found in my basement,
that were on a strange antique format that we couldn't play,
I've now had my team of experts transfer them.
I'm a little bit nervous, yeah. I don't know what to expect here.
Well, let's see what we got.
Hmm...
I don't really want to play it.
I don't know what to expect here.
Oh well, here goes.
"Male Voices. " This should be interesting.
Wow, that is my father's voice.
I recognise it there.
He's talking about that picture we saw.
MAN ON TAPE: 'Ohh! OK!'
That got my dad excited.
It's weird hearing him be so talkative
because I rarely ever heard him talk that much.
'It still feels that way a little bit... '
Was that, "Last MONTH in Austin?" Then I know when this is.
It's interesting because my dad doesn't sound bitter at all.
I think he's sort of on a high
because he'd just finally got some recognition.
This is a month after he went on the trip to Austin.
He said like, "Oh, you should've been in Austin. "
'There's obviously something wrong here. I showed the paradoxes and whatnot.
'Something should change... ' DRUMS AND CYMBALS ON TAPE
Uh-oh. I'm playing drums...
'.. His ultimate conservatism kept coming through. '
Not fazing my dad whatsoever, you'll notice.
'You felt you had to put Johnny on the straight and narrow. '
DRUMS PLAY
'End of this tape. '
It's so weird. It's weird because it's like the sounds of my house there,
and yeah, it's hard because...
as much as I hate to look back on it all,
I'd love to be back there for just one night, maybe.
"Various Voices.
"Duration 21 minutes, seven seconds. "
Sounds like a hit to me.
PURRING
I think that's our cat purring. I'm pretty sure.
I'm pretty sure. It's funny if that's my dad recording that.
If he's recording the cat purring, I wouldn't be surprised.
You know, he did have a thing with animals
that was contrary to the way he was with humans,
which I also have too, it turns out.
As you may have noticed.
GURGLING
I thought I heard a duck. We didn't have a duck.
DISTORTED VOICE ON TAPE:
I wonder whether my delusions of grandeur came from him.
BEEP
And then we've lost power because...
I told you this was a weird family.
We were all clearly experiments.
# I'm turning out just like my father
# Though I swore I never would
# I can say that I have love for him
# I never really understood
# What it must have been like for him
# Living inside his head
# I feel like he's here with me now
# Even though he's dead... #
I feel like I know my father a lot better, you know?
I feel a lot more connected to him.
I understand more, like the whole timeline of events
and when he was dreaming these things up,
when he actually did it.
And just talking to all these people that knew him,
and it's interesting, it feels like he's around now, you know, more than I've ever felt.
THUNDER CRASHES
That was too good.
That's just going to sound like we put that in in sounds effects,
you know, it's too fucking perfect.
# So in the end I'd like to say
# That I'm a very thankful man
# I have some regrets
# But if I had to do it all again
# Well, it's something I'd like to do. #
I'm not a physics genius. I can't even open an umbrella.
For years, I haven't opened up any of the boxes under my house of my dad's stuff.
I've known it was coming eventually. I was going to have to because of the mounting interest in him.
# La la la la la la... #
But now that I'm doing it, I'm really glad I'm doing it, it feels good.
It is such a genuine, unique experience to go through.
However, I still have a little bit of trepidation about the rest of my life,
having to be like the ambassador for the Planet Everett, you know?
Had I known this was coming,
I probably wouldn't have even attempted music and figured,
"Well, I'll get girls this way. "
Then again, physics guys, not really the same as rock stars, are they?
They are though in their world, though, you know.
My dad is a rock star of the physics world, for sure.
SONG ENDS
APPLAUSE
Thanks again, ladies and gentlemen.
CHEERING
# I can't look at the rocket launch
# The trophy wives of the astronauts
# And I won't listen to their words cos I like... birds.
# I don't care for walking downtown Crazy auto car gonna mow me down
# Look at all the people Like cows in a herd
# Well, I like... birds. #