Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives

I really enjoyed the BBC4 documentary Parallel Worlds, Parallel lives, in which Mark Everett, a musician from a band called Eels who styles himself E (I’m pretty sure it’s Eels and not The Eels), investigated the life and times of his late father, the physicist Hugh Everett.

The film was both intensely personal and moving, a real journey of self-discovery, and an interesting exploration of one of the more difficult scientific ideas: the so-called “many worlds” theory of quantum mechanics.

The problem with this theory is that it’s usually grossly oversimplified and expressed in terms of choices we make. Today you stayed home, but in a parallel universe you got up and went to work. In the moment you make a decision, a new universe comes into being. This idea lies at the heart of multitudes of science fiction stories. For example, Alastair Reynolds’ story “Signal to Noise” features a physicist who is spurted as a stream of data into a parallel world in which his wife has not just died. He gets to say goodbye to her properly before the number of possible universes becomes so great that his signal is lost to noise.

The reason that the number of universes burgeon is that these parallel worlds evolve not out of human decisions but out of quantum events: out of the tendency for atoms and other particles to exist in two simultaneous states. Some theorists have suggested that if the difference between parallel universes are not sufficiently great, the possibilities collapse into each other, so that it is only the really different ones that continue to exist.

Anyway, Mark Everett both seeks to lay his personal ghosts to rest (his father died suddenly – and very young; his sister committed suicide; and his mother died shortly afterwards), and to understand something about his father’s theory, which – when first mooted in the late 1950s – was dismissed by the scientific establishment. It only began to gain acceptance twenty years later, long after Charles Everett had given up on scientific research and gone to work first for the Pentagon and later in his own business.

In meeting with some of his father’s former friends and colleagues he gets both an understanding of why his father was the way he was and of the many worlds theory, by way of the double split photon experiment, and the observer’s effect on Schrödinger’s unfortunate cat.

If the theory still ended up being oversimplified, the film worked on the scientific level in terms of giving recognition to a neglected genius. It was also intensely moving, as the personable Mark Everett faced up to his childhood demons. The pivotal moment came when he set about sorting through his father’s boxes, which have been in storage since his mother’s death. He found a plastic bag stuffed with an old dictaphone and tapes. He mentioned to his father’s biographer (who was with him, eager to dig in) that he’d dropped the machine in the bath once.

Once the tapes have been transferred to standard cassette tape, Everett sat down – on camera – to play them. The first tape features his father laughing and talking with friends, enjoying his belated success, just one week after appearing at the University of Texas in 1977, his work finally recognised. Why didn’t the younger Everett recall this happy occasion? The evidence was on the tape: he’s elsewhere in the house practising on the drums, which are clearly audible in the background. A little boy, as lost in his own world (in his own way) as his distant genius father had been.

The next tape we see features the purring of a cat (as Nancy Banks Smith in the Guardian suggests, surely Schrödinger’s), and then the voice of the younger Everett, playing with the dictaphone. In the bath. Priceless.

Probably the best little documentary film I’ve seen in a long time.

BBC4. It’s the new BBC2.

Filed under: Arrested Development, BBC, Character, Culture, Education, Entertainment, Family, Perception, SF, TV, arts, film, heroes, media studies, sci-fi, science fiction