http://www.excite.com/tv/prog.jsp?id=MV004122080000&s=201702270200&sid=36225&sn=STZENHD&st=201702270105&cn=517
excite tv
Side Effects (2013)
517 STZENHD: Monday, February 27 1:05 AM [ 1:05 AM Monday 27 February 2017 Pacific Time USA ]
2013, R, ***, 01:45, Color, English, United States,
A woman's (Rooney Mara) world unravels after her psychiatrist (Jude Law) prescribes a new medication to treat her anxiety.
Cast: Jude Law, Rooney Mara, Channing Tatum, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Vinessa Shaw, Ann Dowd, Mamie Gummer, David Costabile, Michelle Vergara Moore, Vladimir Versailles, Mitchell Michaliszyn, Polly Draper Director(s): Steven Soderbergh Producer(s): Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Gregory Jacobs, Scott Z. Burns Executive Producer(s): James D. Stern, Douglas E. Hansen, Michael Polaire
http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=side-effects-2013
Springfield! Springfield!
Side Effects (2013)
What'd you get me? Em? Em? God damn it. Em? These fucking pills. Em. You sleeping again?
From 9/19/1965 ( premiere US TV series "The Wackiest Ship in the Army" ) To 1/31/2013 is 17301 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 3/16/2013 ( the untimely demise of Kerry Burgess 2005 ) is 17301 days
From 5/4/2005 ( the incident at the police department City of Kent Washington State after my voluntary approach to report material criminal activity directed against my person and I am secretly drugged against my consent ) To 1/31/2013 is 2829 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 8/1/1973 ( Richard Nixon - Veto of the Emergency Medical Services Systems Bill ) is 2829 days
From 12/20/1994 ( in Bosnia as Kerry Wayne Burgess the United States Marine Corps captain this day is my United States Navy Cross medal date of record - for Kerry Burgess 1994-A a brutally violent end of the road ) To 1/31/2013 is 6617 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 12/15/1983 ( premiere US TV series episode "Masquerade" ) is 6617 days
From 3/22/1995 ( premiere US TV series "Sliders" ) To 1/31/2013 is 6525 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 9/14/1983 ( Amy Winehouse ) is 6525 days
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2053463/releaseinfo
IMDb
Side Effects (2013)
Release Info
USA 31 January 2013 (New York City, New York) (premiere)
http://www.tv.com/shows/masquerade/pilot-232885/
tv.com
Masquerade Season 1 Episode 1
Pilot
Aired Thursday 8:00 PM Dec 15, 1983 on ABC
A KGB agent codenamed Wolfen is systematically killing NIA operatives. With no viable agents left and Wolfen the top candidate to become KGB head, Lavender comes up with a desperate plan to use untrained civilians to discredit Wolfen in the eyes of his Soviet bosses before the ruthless killer becomes too powerful to stop.
AIRED: 12/15/83
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2053463/mediaviewer/rm2794919680
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=3926
The American Presidency Project
Richard Nixon
XXXVII President of the United States: 1969 - 1974
226 - Veto of the Emergency Medical Services Systems Bill.
August 1, 1973
To the Senate of the United States:
I am returning today without my approval S. 504, the "Emergency Medical Services Systems Act of 1973."
At my direction, this Administration has been engaged for the past two years in an effort to demonstrate the effectiveness of various types of emergency medical services which can be utilized by local communities. Some $8 million was budgeted for this purpose last fiscal year, and $15 million should be spent in the current fiscal year. I strongly believe the Federal role should be limited to such a demonstration effort, leaving States and communities free to establish the full range of emergency medical services systems that best suit their varying local needs.
By contrast, S. 504 would establish a new Federal grant program which would provide Federal dollars to State and local governments for emergency medical services. The program would be a narrow, categorical one, thrusting the Federal Government into an area which is traditionally a concern of State and local governments and should remain under their jurisdiction.
Instead of providing flexibility for local decisionmaking, a new Federal categorical program of this sort would encourage State and local governments to commit limited funds to federally-defined objectives when their funds might otherwise be spent for local purposes of higher priority.
The bill would authorize appropriations of $185 million for this program over the next three years. This is far in excess of the amounts that can be prudently spent, and S. 504 therefore represents a promise of Federal financial assistance that cannot be kept. I believe all of us must avoid actions of this kind which tend to mislead and therefore disappoint the public.
My second objection to this bill is that it requires the continued operation of the inpatient facilities of the eight general hospitals presently maintained by the Public Health Service. These hospitals have a record of service to this Nation, and especially to its merchant seamen, which is long and distinguished. Nevertheless, it is clear that their inpatient facilities have now outlived their usefulness to the Federal Government. The number of individuals they serve is declining and many of the facilities have become old and outmoded.
Accordingly, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare has embarked upon a program of contracting with community hospitals for the care of those now served by Public Health Service hospitals. The patients now cared for in Public Health Service hospitals are entitled to receive the best medical treatment available. The fact is that many of our community hospitals are more modern, better equipped and more conveniently located than the Public Health facilities and thus would provide better medical care. I cannot agree to legislation that would deny these patients that opportunity.
RICHARD NIXON
The White House,
August 1, 1973.
http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=side-effects-2013
Springfield! Springfield!
Side Effects (2013)
You, on the other hand...
Fuck you! You get her out of
there right now, you hear me?
You do that and you won't hear
from either one of us again.
Yeah, you can go back to chatting with
rich white people
about their problems.
She's cured, as of right now, Jon.
You're a fucking genius!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2053463/quotes
IMDb
Side Effects (2013)
Quotes
Dr. Victoria Siebert: She IS cured! You're a fucking genius.
http://www.tv.com/shows/the-wackiest-ship-in-the-army/shakedown-179268/
tv.com
The Wackiest Ship in the Army Season 1 Episode 1
Shakedown
Aired Sunday 10:00 PM Sep 19, 1965 on NBC
AIRED: 9/19/65
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2053463/quotes
IMDb
Side Effects (2013)
Quotes
Martin's Mother: [reading from Emily's letter] "We go to doctors with our sadness and our faith in the hope they will guide us toward health. But instead I have gone down a path toward a misery I never could have imagined. And I have taken my loved ones with me. My only hope is that no one else follows me to this place."
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2053463/quotes
IMDb
Side Effects (2013)
Quotes
Emily Taylor: I'm not crazy, you know I'm not crazy.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2053463/quotes
IMDb
Side Effects (2013)
Quotes
Dr. Jonathan Banks: I'm a psychiatrist, Miss Taylor. Normally, when people hit things with their car, there are skidmarks on the pavement. A brick wall is a pretty good reason to use the brakes, turn the wheel. You didn't do that.
Sliders
Pilot
Wednesday 22 March 1995
Episode 1 Season 1 DVD video:
00:05:08
Bum in park: It's time to overthrow the chains of capitalist oppression. Communism will sweep the world and the days of the US imperialist war machine are numbered! Take heed, boy! Join the revolution or suffer the consequences!
Quinn Mallory: [ running to class ] Thanks for the warning!
From 7/19/1982 ( Hugh Everett III deceased ) To 3/22/1995 is 4629 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 7/6/1978 ( the Annapolis Maryland United States Naval Academy Class of 1982 induction day for my biological brother Thomas Reagan the United States Navy Fleet Admiral circa 1982 ) is 4629 days
From 10/20/1961 ( premiere US TV series episode "The Twilight Zone"::"The Mirror" ) To 3/22/1995 is 12206 days
12206 = 6103 + 6103
From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 7/19/1982 ( Hugh Everett III deceased ) is 6103 days
From 3/16/1991 ( my first successful major test of my ultraspace matter transportation device as Kerry Wayne Burgess the successful Ph.D. graduate ) To 3/22/1995 is 1467 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 11/8/1969 ( premiere US TV series pilot "Night Gallery" ) is 1467 days
From 7/19/1989 ( the United Airlines Flight 232 crash and the end of Kerry Burgess the natural human being cloned from another human being ) To 3/22/1995 is 2072 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 7/6/1971 ( Richard Nixon - Statement on the Death of Louis Armstrong ) is 2072 days
[ See also: http://hvom.blogspot.com/2017/01/sliders-1995.html ]
[ See also: http://hvom.blogspot.com/2017/02/side-effects-2013.html ]
http://www.tv.com/shows/sliders/pilot-1-29773/
tv.com
Sliders Season 1 Episode 1
Pilot (1)
Aired Unknown Mar 22, 1995 on FOX
AIRED: 3/22/95
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hugh-everett-biography/
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett
After his now celebrated theory of multiple universes met scorn, Hugh Everett abandoned the world of academic physics. He turned to top secret military research and led a tragic private life
By Peter Byrne on October 21, 2008
IN BRIEF
Fifty years ago Hugh Everett devised the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which quantum effects spawn countless branches of the universe with different events occurring in each.
The theory sounds like a bizarre hypothesis, but in fact Everett inferred it from the fundamental mathematics of quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, most physicists of the time dimissed it, and he had to abridge his Ph.D. thesis on the topic to make it seem less controversial.
Discouraged, Everett left physics and worked on military and industrial mathematics and computing. Personally, he was emotionally withdrawn and a heavy drinker.
He died when he was just 51, not living to see the recent respect accorded his ideas by physicists.
Editor's Note: This story was originally printed in the December 2007 issue of Scientific American and is being reposted from our archive in light of a new documentary on PBS, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives.
Hugh Everett III was a brilliant mathematician, an iconoclastic quantum theorist and, later, a successful defense contractor with access to the nation’s most sensitive military secrets. He introduced a new conception of reality to physics and influenced the course of world history at a time when nuclear Armageddon loomed large. To science-fiction aficionados, he remains a folk hero: the man who invented a quantum theory of multiple universes. To his children, he was someone else again: an emotionally unavailable father; “a lump of furniture sitting at the dining room table,” cigarette in hand. He was also a chain-smoking alcoholic who died prematurely.
At least that is how his history played out in our fork of the universe. If the many-worlds theory that Everett developed when he was a student at Princeton University in the mid-1950s is correct, his life took many other turns in an unfathomable number of branching universes.
Everett’s revolutionary analysis broke apart a theoretical logjam in interpreting the how of quantum mechanics. Although the many-worlds idea is by no means universally accepted even today, his methods in devising the theory presaged the concept of quantum decoherence— a modern explanation of why the probabilistic weirdness of quantum mechanics resolves itself into the concrete world of our experience.
Everett’s work is well known in physics and philosophical circles, but the tale of its discovery and of the rest of his life is known by relatively few. Archival research by Russian historian Eugene Shikhovtsev, myself and others and interviews I conducted with the late scientist’s colleagues and friends, as well as with his rock-musician son, unveil the story of a radiant intelligence extinguished all too soon by personal demons.
Ridiculous Things
Everett’s scientific journey began one night in 1954, he recounted two decades later, “after a slosh or two of sherry.” He and his Princeton classmate Charles Misner and a visitor named Aage Petersen (then an assistant to Niels Bohr) were thinking up “ridiculous things about the implications of quantum mechanics.” During this session Everett had the basic idea behind the many-worlds theory, and in the weeks that followed he began developing it into a dissertation.
The core of the idea was to interpret what the equations of quantum mechanics represent in the real world by having the mathematics of the theory itself show the way instead of by appending interpretational hypotheses to the math. In this way, the young man challenged the physics establishment of the day to reconsider its foundational notion of what constitutes physical reality.
In pursuing this endeavor, Everett boldly tackled the notorious measurement problem in quantum mechanics, which had bedeviled physicists since the 1920s. In a nutshell, the problem arises from a contradiction between how elementary particles (such as electrons and photons) interact at the microscopic, quantum level of reality and what happens when the particles are measured from the macroscopic, classical level. In the quantum world, an elementary particle, or a collection of such particles, can exist in a superposition of two or more possible states of being. An electron, for example, can be in a superposition of different locations, velocities and orientations of its spin. Yet anytime scientists measure one of these properties with precision, they see a definite result—just one of the elements of the superposition, not a combination of them. Nor do we ever see macroscopic objects in superpositions. The measurement problem boils down to this question: How and why does the unique world of our experience emerge from the multiplicities of alternatives available in the superposed quantum world?
Physicists use mathematical entities called wave functions to represent quantum states. A wave function can be thought of as a list of all the possible configurations of a superposed quantum system, along with numbers that give the probability of each configuration’s being the one, seemingly selected at random, that we will detect if we measure the system. The wave function treats each element of the superposition as equally real, if not necessarily equally probable from our point of view.
The Schrödinger equation delineates how a quantum system’s wave function will change through time, an evolution that it predicts will be smooth and deterministic (that is, with no randomness). But that elegant mathematics seems to contradict what happens when humans observe a quantum system, such as an electron, with a scientific instrument (which itself may be regarded as a quantum-mechanical system). For at the moment of measurement, the wave function describing the superposition of alternatives appears to collapse into one member of the superposition, thereby interrupting the smooth evolution of the wave function and introducing discontinuity. A single measurement outcome emerges, banishing all the other possibilities from classically described reality. Which alternative is produced at the moment of measurement appears to be arbitrary; its selection does not evolve logically from the information- packed wave function of the electron before measurement. Nor does the mathematics of collapse emerge from the seamless flow of the Schrödinger equation. In fact, collapse has to be added as a postulate, as an additional process that seems to violate the equation.
Many of the founders of quantum mechanics, notably Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and John von Neumann, agreed on an interpretation of quantum mechanics—known as the Copenhagen interpretation— to deal with the measurement problem. This model of reality postulates that the mechanics of the quantum world reduce to, and only find meaning in terms of, classically observable phenomena—not the reverse.
This approach privileges the external observer, placing that observer in a classical realm that is distinct from the quantum realm of the object observed. Though unable to explain the nature of the boundary between the quantum and classical realms, the Copenhagenists nonetheless used quantum mechanics with great technical success. Entire generations of physicists were taught that the equations of quantum mechanics work only in one part of reality, the microscopic, while ceasing to be relevant in another, the macroscopic. It is all that most physicists ever need.
Universal Wave Function
In stark contrast, Everett addressed the measurement problem by merging the microscopic and macroscopic worlds. He made the observer an integral part of the system observed, introducing a universal wave function that links observers and objects as parts of a single quantum system. He described the macroscopic world quantum mechanically and thought of large objects as existing in quantum superpositions as well. Breaking with Bohr and Heisenberg, he dispensed with the need for the discontinuity of a wave-function collapse.
Everett’s radical new idea was to ask, What if the continuous evolution of a wave function is not interrupted by acts of measurement? What if the Schrödinger equation always applies and applies to everything—objects and observers alike? What if no elements of superpositions are ever banished from reality? What would such a world appear like to us?
Everett saw that under those assumptions, the wave function of an observer would, in effect, bifurcate at each interaction of the observer with a superposed object. The universal wave function would contain branches for every alternative making up the object’s superposition. Each branch has its own copy of the observer, a copy that perceived one of those alternatives as the outcome. According to a fundamental mathematical property of the Schrödinger equation, once formed, the branches do not influence one another. Thus, each branch embarks on a different future, independently of the others.
Consider a person measuring a particle that is in a superposition of two states, such as an electron in a superposition of location A and location B. In one branch, the person perceives that the electron is at A. In a nearly identical branch, a copy of the person perceives that the same electron is at B. Each copy of the person perceives herself or himself as being one of a kind and sees chance as cooking up one reality from a menu of physical possibilities, even though, in the full reality, every alternative on the menu happens.
Explaining how we would perceive such a universe requires putting an observer into the picture. But the branching process happens regardless of whether a human being is present. In general, at each interaction between physical systems the total wave function of the combined systems would tend to bifurcate in this way. Today’s understanding of how the branches become independent and each turn out looking like the classical reality we are accustomed to is known as decoherence theory. It is an accepted part of standard modern quantum theory, although not everyone agrees with the Everettian interpretation that all the branches represent realities that exist.
Everett was not the first physicist to criticize the Copenhagen collapse postulate as inadequate. But he broke new ground by deriving a mathematically consistent theory of a universal wave function from the equations of quantum mechanics itself. The existence of multiple universes emerged as a consequence of his theory, not a predicate. In a footnote in his thesis, Everett wrote: “From the viewpoint of the theory, all elements of a superposition (all ‘branches’) are ‘actual,’ none any more ‘real’ than the rest.”
The draft containing all these ideas provoked a remarkable behind-the-scenes struggle, uncovered about five years ago in archival research by Olival Freire, Jr., a historian of science at the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil. In the spring of 1956 Everett’s academic adviser at Princeton, John Archibald Wheeler, took the draft dissertation to Copenhagen to convince the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters to publish it. He wrote to Everett that he had “three long and strong discussions about it” with Bohr and Petersen. Wheeler also shared his student’s work with several other physicists at Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics, including Alexander W. Stern.
Splits
Wheeler’s letter to Everett reported: “Your beautiful wave function formalism of course remains unshaken; but all of us feel that the real issue is the words that are to be attached to the quantities of the formalism.” For one thing, Wheeler was troubled by Everett’s use of “splitting” humans and cannonballs as scientific metaphors. His letter revealed the Copenhagen-ists’ discomfort over the meaning of Everett’s work. Stern dismissed Everett’s theory as “theology,” and Wheeler himself was reluctant to challenge Bohr. In a long, politic letter to Stern, he explicated and excused Everett’s theory as an extension, not a refutation, of the prevailing interpretation of quantum mechanics:
I think I may say that this very fine and able and independently thinking young man has gradually come to accept the present approach to the measurement problem as correct and self-consistent, despite a few traces that remain in the present thesis draft of a past dubious attitude. So, to avoid any possible misunderstanding, let me say that Everett’s thesis is not meant to question the present approach to the measurement problem, but to accept it and generalize it. [Emphasis in original.]
Everett would have completely disagreed with Wheeler’s description of his opinion of the Copenhagen interpretation. For example, a year later, when responding to criticisms from Bryce S. DeWitt, editor of the journal Reviews of Modern Physics, he wrote:
The Copenhagen Interpretation is hopelessly incomplete because of its a priori reliance on classical physics ... as well as a philosophic monstrosity with a “reality” concept for the macroscopic world and denial of the same for the microcosm.
While Wheeler was off in Europe arguing his case, Everett was in danger of losing his student draft deferment. To avoid going to boot camp, he decided to take a research job at the Pentagon. He moved to the Washington, D.C., area and never came back to theoretical physics.
During the next year, however, he communicated long-distance with Wheeler as he reluctantly whittled down his thesis to a quarter of its original length. In April 1957 Everett’s thesis committee accepted the abridged version—without the “splits.” Three months later Reviews of Modern Physics published the shortened version, entitled “‘Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics.” In the same issue, a companion paper by Wheeler lauded his student’s discovery.
When the paper appeared in print, it slipped into instant obscurity. Wheeler gradually distanced himself from association with Everett’s theory, but he kept in touch with the theorist, encouraging him, in vain, to do more work in quantum mechanics. In an interview last year, Wheeler, then 95, commented that “[Everett] was disappointed, perhaps bitter, at the nonreaction to his theory. How I wish that I had kept up the sessions with Everett. The questions that he brought up were important.”
Nuclear Military Strategies
Princeton awarded Everett his doctorate nearly a year after he had begun his first project for the Pentagon: calculating potential mortality rates from radioactive fallout in a nuclear war. He soon headed the mathematics division in the Pentagon’s nearly invisible but extremely influential Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG). Everett advised high-level officials in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations on the best methods for selecting hydrogen bomb targets and structuring the nuclear triad of bombers, submarines and missiles for optimal punch in a nuclear strike.
In 1960 he helped write WSEG No. 50, a catalytic report that remains classified to this day. According to Everett’s friend and WSEG colleague George E. Pugh, as well as historians, WSEG No. 50 rationalized and promoted military strategies that were operative for decades, including the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. WSEG provided nuclear warfare policymakers with enough scary information about the global effects of radioactive fallout that many became convinced of the merit of waging a perpetual standoff—as opposed to, as some powerful people were advocating, launching preemptive first strikes on the Soviet Union, China and other communist countries.
One final chapter in the struggle over Everett’s theory also played out in this period. In the spring of 1959 Bohr granted Everett an interview in Copenhagen. They met several times during a six-week period but to little effect: Bohr did not shift his position, and Everett did not reenter quantum physics research. The excursion was not a complete failure, though. One afternoon, while drinking beer at the Hotel Østerport, Everett wrote out on hotel stationery an important refinement of the other mathematical tour de force for which he is renowned, the generalized Lagrange multiplier method, also known as the Everett algorithm. The method simplifies searches for optimum solutions to complex logistical problems—ranging from the deployment of nuclear weapons to just-in-time industrial production schedules to the routing of buses for maximizing the desegregation of school districts.
In 1964 Everett, Pugh and several other WSEG colleagues founded a private defense company, Lambda Corporation. Among other activities, it designed mathematical models of anti-ballistic missile systems and computerized nuclear war games that, according to Pugh, were used by the military for years. Everett became enamored of inventing applications for Bayes’ theorem, a mathematical method of correlating the probabilities of future events with past experience. In 1971 Everett built a prototype Bayesian machine, a computer program that learns from experience and simplifies decision making by deducing probable outcomes, much like the human faculty of common sense. Under contract to the Pentagon, Lambda used the Bayesian method to invent techniques for tracking trajectories of incoming ballistic missiles.
In 1973 Everett left Lambda and started a data-processing company, DBS, with Lambda colleague Donald Reisler. DBS researched weapons applications but specialized in analyzing the socioeconomic effects of government affirmative action programs. When they first met, Reis-ler recalls, Everett “sheepishly” asked whether he had ever read his 1957 paper. “I thought for an instant and replied, ‘Oh, my God, you are that Everett, the crazy one who wrote that insane paper,’” Reisler says. “I had read it in graduate school and chuckled, rejected it out of hand.” The two became close friends but agreed not to talk about multiple universes again.
Three-Martini Lunches
Despite all these successes, Everett’s life was blighted in many ways. He had a reputation for drinking, and friends say the problem seemed only to grow with time. According to Reisler, his partner usually enjoyed a three-martini lunch, sleeping it off in his office—although he still managed to be productive.
Yet his hedonism did not reflect a relaxed, playful attitude toward life. “He was not a sympathetic person,” Reisler says. “He brought a cold, brutal logic to the study of things. Civil-rights entitlements made no sense to him.”
John Y. Barry, a former colleague of Everett’s at WSEG, also questioned his ethics. In the mid-1970s Barry convinced his employers at J. P. Morgan to hire Everett to develop a Bayesian method of predicting movement in the stock market. By several accounts, Everett succeeded— and then refused to turn the product over to J. P. Morgan. “He used us,” Barry recalls. “[He was] a brilliant, innovative, slippery, untrustworthy, probably alcoholic individual.”
Everett was egocentric. “Hugh liked to espouse a form of extreme solipsism,” says Elaine Tsiang, a former employee at DBS. “Although he took pains to distance his [many-worlds] theory from any theory of mind or consciousness, obviously we all owed our existence relative to the world he had brought into being.”
And he barely knew his children, Elizabeth and Mark.
As Everett pursued his entrepreneurial career, the world of physics was starting to take a hard look at his once ignored theory. DeWitt swung around 180 degrees and became its most devoted champion. In 1967 he wrote an article presenting the Wheeler-DeWitt equation: a universal wave function that a theory of quantum gravity should satisfy. He credited Everett for having demonstrated the need for such an approach. DeWitt and his graduate student Neill Graham then edited a book of physics papers, The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, which featured the unamputated version of Everett’s dissertation. The epigram “many worlds” stuck fast, popularized in the science-fiction magazine Analog in 1976.
Not everybody agrees, however, that the Copenhagen interpretation needs to give way. Cornell University physicist N. David Mermin maintains that the Everett interpretation treats the wave function as part of the objectively real world, whereas he sees it as merely a mathematical tool. “A wave function is a human construction,” Mer-min says. “Its purpose is to enable us to make sense of our macroscopic observations. My point of view is exactly the opposite of the many-worlds interpretation. Quantum mechanics is a device for enabling us to make our observations coherent, and to say that we are inside of quantum mechanics and that quantum mechanics must apply to our perceptions is inconsistent.”
But many working physicists say that Everett’s theory should be taken seriously.
“When I heard about Everett’s interpretation in the late 1970s,” says Stephen Shenker, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University, “I thought it was kind of crazy. Now most of the people I know that think about string theory and quantum cosmology think about something along an Everett-style interpretation. And because of recent developments in quantum computation, these questions are no longer academic.”
One of the pioneers of decoherence, Wojciech H. Zurek, a fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, comments that “Everett’s accomplishment was to insist that quantum theory should be universal, that there should not be a division of the universe into something which is a priori classical and something which is a priori quantum. He gave us all a ticket to use quantum theory the way we use it now to describe measurement as a whole.”
String theorist Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., reflects a common attitude among his colleagues: “When I think about the Everett theory quantum mechanically, it is the most reasonable thing to believe. In everyday life, I do not believe it.”
In 1977 DeWitt and Wheeler invited Everett, who hated public speaking, to make a presentation on his interpretation at the University of Texas at Austin. He wore a rumpled black suit and chain-smoked throughout the seminar. David Deutsch, now at the University of Oxford and a founder of the field of quantum computation (itself inspired by Everett’s theory), was there. “Everett was before his time,” Deutsch says in summing up Everett’s contribution. “He represents the refusal to relinquish objective explanation. A great deal of harm was done to progress in both physics and philosophy by the abdication of the original purpose of those fields: to explain the world. We got irretrievably bogged down in formalisms, and things were regarded as progress which are not explanatory, and the vacuum was filled by mysticism and religion and every kind of rubbish. Everett is important because he stood out against it.”
After the Texas visit, Wheeler tried to hook Everett up with the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif. Everett reportedly was interested, but nothing came of the plan.
Totality of Experience
Everett died in bed on July 19, 1982. He was just 51. His son, Mark, then a teenager, remembers finding his father’s lifeless body that morning. Feeling the cold body, Mark realized he had no memory of ever touching his dad before. “I did not know how to feel about the fact that my father just died,” he told me. “I didn’t really have any relationship with him.”
Not long afterward, Mark moved to Los Angeles. He became a successful songwriter and the lead singer for a popular rock band, Eels. Many of his songs express the sadness he experienced as the son of a depressed, alcoholic, emotionally detached man. It was not until years after his father’s death that Mark learned of Everett’s career and accomplishments.
Mark’s sister, Elizabeth, made the first of many suicide attempts in June 1982, only a month before Everett died. Mark discovered her unconscious on the bathroom floor and got her to the hospital just in time. When he returned home later that night, he recalled, his father “looked up from his newspaper and said, ‘I didn’t know she was that sad.’” In 1996 Elizabeth killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills, leaving a note in her purse saying she was going to join her father in another universe.
In a 2005 song, “Things the Grandchildren Should Know,” Mark wrote: “I never really understood/ what it must have been like for him/living inside his head.” His solipsistically inclined father would have understood that dilemma. “Once we have granted that any physical theory is essentially only a model for the world of experience,” Everett concluded in the unedited version of his dissertation, “we must renounce all hope of finding anything like the correct theory ... simply because the totality of experience is never accessible to us.”
Sliders
Pilot
Wednesday 22 March 1995
Episode 1 Season 1 DVD video:
00:05:09
Professor Maximilian Arturo: As even the most intellectually impoverished physicist knows, the largest symmetry group of a single Dirac field is - ? The silence is deafening.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1561881/bio
IMDb
Amy Winehouse
Biography
Date of Birth 14 September 1983, Southgate, London, England, UK
Date of Death 23 July 2011, Camden, London, England, UK (alcohol poisoning)
Birth Name Amy Jade Winehouse
http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=side-effects-2013
Springfield! Springfield!
Side Effects (2013)
State revoke your license, yet?
I always tell my patients,
"You know what the best predictor
of future behavior is?
"Past behavior. "
Well, you don't have
any more patients.
The only problem with having
a crazy person for a partner
is they tend to stay crazy.
https://www.modelsailboat.com/Images/Mystic%20Seaport%2072.JPG
http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=side-effects-2013
Springfield! Springfield!
Side Effects (2013)
And she told me that her
marriage with her husband
had never been anything
but a meeting of minds.
And minds start to
wander after a while.
He had traded her in for a
younger model, so she was
alone and lonely.
side-effects-2013.jpg
http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=side-effects-2013
Springfield! Springfield!
Side Effects (2013)
It didn't take much.
I think she always liked girls,
she just never found one
she liked as much as me.
http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=side-effects-2013
Springfield! Springfield!
Side Effects (2013)
EMILY: It's not a decision
you make just once.
You make it over and over again,
every time you look at your life
and you see the position you're
in and who put you there.
And it all leads back to him.
Each and every fucking
problem, every disappointment.
And you think to yourself,
"Maybe if he just goes away,
it'll all get better. "
Everything would have
worked out perfectly
if you had just disappeared
after the trial
like you were supposed to.
- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 03:33 AM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Monday 27 February 2017
