You’ve Heard It (and not Heard It) a Million Times Before
While
surfing the net, I came upon a site called The Universes of Max Tegmark with a
long expose of Tegmark’s ideas about multiple universes, including a thought
experiment he refers to as quantum suicide, which he apparently cooked up back
in 1998, though Wikipedia claims that the same notion was discussed by Hans
Moravec in 1987 and Bruno Marchal in 1988. Suppose you set up an experiment in
which a gun fires or does not fire depending on whether it turns out that the
spin of a given particle points up or down. The odds are 50/50 for this
completely indeterminate quantum event. Now suppose that an experimental
subject sits in front of the gun and will be killed if the gun fires and will
go on living if it does not.
According to Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation of quantum
mechanics, both outcomes occur, but in non-communicating, parallel worlds. From
the point of view of the experimental subject, however, only one outcome is
observable so that in principle a scientist who is willing to put their life on
the line could verify the many-world’s interpretation by repeating the
experiment on herself until the null hypothesis were rejected with any desired
level of confidence. The experiment raises the possibility that everyone is
immortal from their own point of view, assuming, and it’s a big assumption,
that there is always set of some quantum events that would allow the subject to
avoid death. This notion apparently occurred to Everett himself. According to his
friend Keith Lynch, “Everett firmly believed that his many-worlds theory
guaranteed him immortality: His consciousness, he argued, is bound at each
branching to follow whatever path does not lead to death.”
Here’s
the strange thing. I wrote a short story back in 1985 that features a version
of the quantum-suicide idea. I wasn’t trying to do physics without a
license—the experiment was just an elaborate plot device—but I wonder where I
got the idea from or if I just pulled it out of my ass. The story itself isn’t
anything special. Only a few friends and relatives ever read it. I’m offering
it here for its curiosity value.
All Men are Mortal
I always treasured my obscurity much as other people cherish
their fame. I chose quite deliberately to be a mousey and obsequious
nonentity—not out of timidity and certainly not because I think humility to be
a virtue, but solely out of a cunning and shameless selfishness. I very early
recognized that the world always takes more than it gives its famous names.
That’s clear to any halfway intelligent observer in the case of celebrities who
are doomed to carry, Atlas-like, the lust, envy, or devotion of the many; but I
saw that it was no different for the local real estate man who must atone for
his minor triumphs in the Purgatory of the Rotarian luncheon. The visible man
inevitably becomes a symbol to his fellows, his identity a pawn in a pointless
game whose rules are laid down by the others. I wanted to possess myself, and I
made this project the rule of my life.
That’s why I became a professor of English Literature at a
small college in Ohio. Of course as a teacher and researcher I did have a
social role, but a role far less burdensome than the strenuous occupations of
rebel or madman that a less subtle man might have rashly chosen in pursuit of
himself. I would have preferred to be utterly invisible or transparent; but,
obliged to take on some color, I opted for gray. I thought of myself as a
geode, one of those wonderful hollow rocks which looks like a nondescript clod
of dirt from outside, but whose dark interior hides a brilliant bloom of
colorful crystals.
In this disguise I might have lived and died like a dog in
perfect happiness. It was not to be.
I had fallen asleep in my armchair watching an indifferent
baseball game on the television when I suddenly startled awake. I thought
something had finally happened in the ballgame, but the score was still 0 to 0
in extra innings. “Muscle twitch,” I muttered to myself. I was still rubbing my
eyes when I heard a loud but muffled crack coming from the other unit of my
duplex. I might have ignored it if I lived in a big city, but Lindley is a very
small town indeed, and I couldn’t imagine what could have caused such a noise.
Certainly, I didn’t think that my neighbor would do anything rash. Bill Wolfson
was a physics professor at my school, an unremarkable middle-aged man with whom
I was friendly but hardly close.
I got up, walked around to his door, and called out to him.
There was no answer, but the lights were on in the kitchen, so I was sure he
must be at home. The door was, as usual, unlocked, and I hurried in, suddenly
concerned that something had happened to Bill.
As you will have already gathered, I am a most stolid
individual; but I confess that what I saw in the kitchen left me gasping for
breath. Bill, or what remained of him, sat or sprawled on cheap dinette chair.
His jaws were still clamped tightly on the barrel of an old 10-gauge shotgun.
The top of his head was gone and the wall beyond was splattered with blood and
brains. An atrocious odor of smoke and burning flesh filled the air. It took a
moment for me to be sure that the shock of this grisly scene had not given me a
coronary, but as my heartbeat gradually slowed again, I noticed a yet more
macabre particular. Bill had set up a video camera on the kitchen counter, and
I could still hear the gentle whine of the recorder. For some unaccountable
reason, this perfectly normal man had blown his brains out and recorded it all
on a Panasonic. I turned of the machine as one might close the eyes of a
corpse. Then I called the police.
While I was waiting, I discovered one more thing. Bill had a
microcomputer on the kitchenette table. It had been turned off, but I noticed
that a long manuscript was hanging from the printer. I guessed it was a suicide
note, as indeed it was. For Bill’s sake and, I admit, from my own curiosity, I
tore it from the printer and hastily carried it back to my own apartment. I
could think of no better place to hide it than my freezer where I nestled it
among the petrified leftovers and frozen steaks.
When I returned the cops were banging on the front door. I
let them in and showed them to the kitchen. The local police turned out to me
far more efficient than I expected. They were also a little irritating to me
with their exaggerated deference as if I were some hysterical old woman whose
world had been irremediably shattered. In fact, though I actually liked Wolfson
well enough, I was more intrigued than horrified by what had transpired,
especially since a glance at this last words had given me an inkling that this
was anything but the routine suicide of a secretly desperate man. Besides,
though I have long affected a slight, scholarly stoop as part of personal
disguise, I’m really in very good shape. For once it offended by vanity to be
dismissed as an old crock. And dismissed I was, “You can come down to the
station anytime tomorrow and make a statement, Professor Hayes—just a
formality—no need to worry about it.”
As I imagine the young sergeant expected, I nodded gravely
and withdrew to my own side of the duplex, but only because I couldn’t think of
a credible reason to hang around the scene of this fascinating incident. As I
left, I passed the medical examiner, Dr Stingley, coming in. We looked at each
other for an instant—I had played bridge with the man once or twice—and I
remember whether this neat little man was as shrewd and competent in his morgue
as he was at the card table.
I was extremely anxious to read the dead man’s last message,
but both from prudence and a sense of style I decided to wait. I was slightly
concerned that I might somehow be discovered with the note if I read it while
the police were still rummaging through Bill’s place, but even more than that,
it occurred to me that the fragile old scholar character I was playing had to
react to the horror he had witnessed with some suitable show of unease. That no
one would see me wring my hands and pace through my apartment was immaterial: I
was artist enough to know that follow-through is as crucial to pretence as it
is to a golf swing. It vexed me inwardly, however, that I couldn’t find out who
won the ball game.
It was only much later, when the voices and footsteps from
next door had ceased, that I removed the printout from my freezer and with a
tint of ice cream. I sat at my own kitchen table eating marble fudge out of the
carton and reading the peculiar message Bill had left behind.
Wolfson’s Testament was almost forty pages long—apparently
word processing makes even suicides voluble—and was by turns affecting, closely
reasoned, and simply crazy. It began with a cri de coeur, “Dear Woody, dear,
dear Woody. How I hate you,” and continued in the same Joan Crawford vein for
some pages. The tale was a hackneyed one. Bill had fallen in love with Woody;
Woody had reciprocated; now Woody had jilted Bill. Bill couldn’t take it, would
make Woody sorry, etc. I was a little disappointed, though it was interesting
that Bill had evidently had a homosexual affair—I assumed Woody was a he. I was
also surprised that so wooden a figure as Bill Wolfson could work himself into
such fits of emotion.
As I read along, it gradually dawned on me that Bill never
actually used the word suicide. He always referred to blowing his brains out as
‘the experiment.’ At first I dismissed this locution as gallows humor, but it
became clear that Bill wasn’t kidding. “I’ve become a mad scientist. In a few
hours, I may be dead, but if I’m not, I’ll know the biggest secret of them all
because I’m going to perform the grandest and craziest experiment of them all.
I’m going to find out if it is possible to turn out the lights.” Somehow the
mundane business of self-destruction had gotten conflated in Wolfson’s mind
with a weird metaphysical experiment. I interpreted his remarks as a kind of
prosy paraphrase of ‘to be or not to be,’ but evidently the undiscovered
country he had in mind was not the next world but simply his kitchen. For some reason, Bill seemed to think
that he could blow his brains out without dying.
Bill’s ramblings also had a cosmic slant. Sometimes he wrote
grandiloquently about his own existence as “the big, obscene mystery,” and
likened his mind to a hot, naked light bulb shining alone in a huge, empty
garage. “Without me, without the inexplicable witness, what is there in this
world but silence, dust, and cobwebs? Why should the light go on burning? Why
does it have to hurt?” Apparently Bill thought this his shotgun would supply an
explanation or, failing that, at least the sovereign Novocain of oblivion.
Sometimes Bill fairly cackled with crazy glee over what he
was doing, but mostly he sounded guilty, and not just because of the pain he
planned to inflect on his lover. “I’m a mad scientist because I’m not going to
solve this puzzle for anyone but myself. If Frankenstein had proposed to
reanimate the dead at the Salk Institute instead of his lonely castle, I bet he
would have gotten a grant. In science you can try anything, but you have to let
everybody in on it. That’s my secret crime. I’m going to find out about that
fucking light bulb, but only for me, Dr. William Wolfson. I’m fed up with being
a good little boy.”
Wolfson went on like this for many pages, but just when I
thought he would on repeating himself to the end, his tone abruptly changed. I
found myself reading a proper treatise on the physics of death. “Ironically, it
was you who first pointed out that my interpretation of quantum mechanics may
have drastic consequence. Consider an inertial frame of reference such that…” I
sighed. In such a dark wood a
humanist like me was immediately astray. I who have made a career out of
glossing Joyce and Pound could barely stay afloat in a pitchy sea of standing
waves, singularities, and nodes, of Hilbert spaces and Hamiltonians. Every time
I though I had caught my bearings, the page would break out with equations—it
might as well have been written in Chinese. I was all the more frustrated
because from time to time I caught sight of a human meaning, but only when a
little jagged piece of comprehensible madness broke the black and greasy surface
of scientific reason.
To my increasing confusion, Bill went on and on about an
animal called Schrödinger’s Cat, and the Anthropoid Principle, and somebody
named, improbably enough, Hugh Everett the Third. I was nearly ready to put the
paper away and simply go to bed when I arrived at the crux. I had repeatedly
read and re-read on particularly dense paragraph without really registering its
point when I realized that I had jotted down a note that summarized the whole
amazing performance: “Gist of the theory: everybody is literally immortal from
their own point of view.” That night between the writing down and the reading
over, I felt a distinct sensation of falling.
As any rate, I woke up. While Bill’s reasons were completely
opaque to me, his conclusion was quite straightforward. According to him, the
stream of time constantly branches into an infinite delta of parallel worlds.
Everything physically possible—and apparently that just about anything
imaginable—can and in fact does happen in one of the emerging worlds. It
follows that whatever peril I undergo, there will always be some escape hatch,
some quirk of destiny, which will allow my consciousness to move ahead into one
or more futures. We’re all like James Bond or Luke Skywalker. We always dodge the
razor-sharp brim of Odd Jobs bowler; we always elude the light saber of the
invincible Vader. We can’t even die of old age, for if need be the atoms of our
sclerotic arteries will jig instead of jag and get us out of the ICU. The Hell
with Aristotle. No man is mortal.
All of this is, of course, sheer theory and lunatic theory
at that as Bill seems to have realized. He was too much of a scientist to
accept his conclusion a priori. Hence the experiment. “When I shoot myself, I
won’t prove a damn thing to anybody but me. In most universes I’ll simply be a
problem for the coroner and for you, faithless Woody. From my perspective,
though, only successful outcomes can occur; they are the only cases in which
I’ll be around to draw a conclusion. I calculate that if shoot myself a couple
of times and live, I will verify my own immortality at the .001 confidence
level.”
Had you asked me then what I thought of Wolfsan’s theory I
would have dismissed it as symptomology.
Certainly I was not overwhelmed by all of Bill’s technicalities. O, the
pages full of unintelligible mathematics, with their elegant integral signs,
Greek letters, and symbols that looked like backward 6’s, were impressive,
especially the conclusions marked with a little square for QED. The citations of
Bohr, Einstein, and Tipler meant nothing to me. I had no way of knowing whether
Bill’s physics was legitimate and in any case doubted if scientific reasoning
could touch cogently on a matter of such existential concern. Besides, Bill
himself insisted that his experiment violated all the rules of his profession,
for it could only yield a personal sort of knowledge. If he fired the shotgun
and lived, he might learn something, but in the vast majority of universes the
result would simply be a half-headless corpse and a bemused neighbor.
For all my skepticism, I admit I did hope that Bill wasn’t
just nuts. What gripped me was the reawakening of an ancient human hope. Who
has not secretly consoled himself with the fantasy of his own immortality?
Young men are said to disbelieve their own mortality—it is this crazy
confidence that sends them whistling off to war. But in the middle of the night
when an inexplicable pain wakens an old man’s anxiety, what half-formed thought
allows sleep, if not the old dream that it can’t happen to me? I recall that at
the end of his life the novelist William Saroyan wrote that he always thought
he was exempt from death because was such a good writer, By Wolfson’s theory,
one need not fend off one’s doom with superior adjectives, and it isn’t just
the heroes who can look forward to the Elysian Fields.
Shaking off such ruminations, I continued to read the note.
After all the physics, Bill went on for several paragraphs discussing the
ethical import of his ideas. It was as if Wolfson were working out the moral
consequences of physical immortality. He seemed to think that right ad wrong
were as cut and dried as mathematics and that the new postulate of everlasting
life, like the denial of the parallel postulate in geometry, would generate a
sort of non-Euclidean morality. He concentrated, not surprisingly, on the new
ethics of suicide. “If I am right, murder isn’t so bad as we had thought. In
some ways in is impossible. Suicide takes the place of honor, for it harms the
living at no cost to the erstwhile victim. In 99.999999% of all universes I
will leave you alone to mediate on what you’ve done to me. Trillions of Woods
will have to live with that I’ve done while in the comparably few worlds in
which I go only living, I will glory in the thought of my revenge and the
possession of my great secret.”
Bill’s note wound up with a dark hymn to loneliness. “People
have thought that death was the great evil, but the great evil is really
loneliness. We will all live on forever in our separate universes, but our
immortality will cost us the loss of everyone we ever love. Losing someone is
bad enough for beings that can die, but they can at least console themselves
with the thought that they too will pass away. In the new world I give you, my
faithless lover, there is only eternal loneliness. That was your last gift to
me, Woody. Now I’m returning it.” It was this last passage that I had read
while it was still hanging on Bill’s printer.
It was almost 5 when I looked up from this peculiar
document. I would have to go down to the police station in a few hours, and the
prospect made me feel exceedingly weary. Worse was to befall me, for as I
undressed it struck me that my attempt to protect Wolfson might be in vain. I
might even be in trouble myself. In the excitement of discovering the body and
the not, it hadn’t occurred to me that the note might be preserved
electronically in the machine. I tried to remember if the power were still on
whether that made a difference. Would Dr. Stingley be able to determine if the
note had ever been printed out? For once I wished I knew something about the
damned computers. With such thoughts gnawing away at me, I struggled to fall
asleep and finally succeeded.
I woke up with the happy thought that I was in fact immortal.
I jumped out of bed and shouted at no one in particular. Then I chuckled
because no one was there to hear me in the silent house.
“Ah well,” I thought, “Life goes on!” I remembered I had
errands to run. I picked up my laundry, I went grocery shopping; and to the
amusement of several kids, I played a video game in the mall. Everything could
have happened the same way a day before my discovery, but somehow my little
chores had become intensely pleasurable. Everything was a privilege—a drink of
water, the sound of my shoes slapping on the sidewalk in front of Watson’s
diner, the blowzy friendliness of the checkout clerk at the supermarket.
Everything was magical because of all the inhabitants of the earth, I alone
owned these ordinary moments free and clear. I could go to the store a million
times. I could let my mind wander for a century if I liked, for my thoughts
were as eternal as God’s and I would never again be under any obligation to
come to a conclusion.
I amused myself with the theological consequences of my new
state. Surely an every lasting being is eo ipso God even if he is also a
harmless middle-aged man in polyester pants. Of course, I knew I was neither omnipotent
nor omniscient, but it seem to me that I ha a far more important attribute of
divinity: complacency. I didn’t need thunderbolts or a cloak of fire. I didn’t
need a chorus line of angels behind me. I would be a hidden God whose
transcendence never manifested itself in anything more violent than an
infinitely knowing smile whose secret I alone possessed.
I looked up at the sun and though that after that great
light goes out for good, my stubborn little habits would to on, the true laws
of nature. Under a new heaven, I would someday absently pick my teeth and
recite poetry to myself.
That sun kept getting brighter and brighter until I realized
that it was the sun coming in my bedroom window and that I had been dreaming.
It took me a few minutes to sort out what was dream and what was history. A
quick trip to the freezer assured me that Bill Wolfson had indeed died in the
name of science and love and that I still had a problem with the coroner. By
then I certainly didn’t feel immortal. My eyes were red, and my whole body
ached.
It was about eleven when I finally went in to see the
police. A visibly bored secretary took my statement, and I began to hope that
the whole affair would blow over. I had risen to leave when the young woman
stopped me. “Excuse me, Professor
Hayes. The medical examiner would like to have a word with you before you go.”
Stingley’s office was at the end of one of those linoleum
halls what could as easily be part of a hospital, a junior college, or a
courthouse. His secretary showed me into a tiny office shoe air bore, or so I
imagined, a faint aroma of formaldehyde. Stingley came in almost immediately.
He wore his usual neat suit with its aggressively unfashionable how tie, but
his seemed uncharacteristically frayed as if he had been up most of the night.
His eyes were red and staring.
“I’m glad you came in, Dr. Hayes,” he began formally. “There
are a couple of details about Bill Wolfson’s death that need cleaning up.
“I wouldn’t think there would be much for a medical examiner
to do in a case like this.”
“You wouldn’t think so. Certainly the immediate cause of
death is no medical mystery.”
“Was Bill drinking?” I ventured.
“I don’t me to be impolite, but I think I’ll ask the
questions. Tell me what happened.”
“I just gave my statement.”
“Be good enough to repeat it.” Stingley’s request sounded
like an order.
In my best academic-obtuse fashion, I told him what
happened—everything but the detail about the printout.
“Look, Dr. Hayes, I know this whole affair makes you
nervous, but please spare me the professor bit. You can’t be more than 50 and,
according to the college, you publish three or four articles a year even though
you have tenure. You aren’t the diffuse old gent you pretend to be. Your secret
is safe with me, but I want information.”
“Very well,” I said and pulled up my chair. I was impressed
by this young fellows acumen.
“Who’s Woody?”
“I don’t know anybody of that name.”
“You’ve encountered the name recently, though, haven’t you?”
I was framing an answer when Stingley help up his hand, “I
know all about the printout. When you tore it off, you left a piece of one page
hanging on the printer. It had the last page number on it.”
I opened my mouth but didn’t manage to say anything.
“Please don’t deny it. When I first realized that you had
taken the printout, I thought you might be involved somehow; but after I read
the note, I guessed you took it to satisfy your own curiosity. Anyhow, you
certainly aren’t Woody.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Woody is a woman. I found some letters Wolfson wrote to her
on his machine. Unfortunately, they must have been hand delivered. There were no addresses.”
I tried to protest my innocence.
“Please don’t waste my time professor. In the first place
you were the only one who had a chance to get the printout. The machine was
still warm when I arrive. It had just been turned off. It follows that it had
been used just before Wolfson shot himself.”
“Couldn’t someone have removed it between the time I hard
the shot and came in.”
“It would have been on the video recording. Besides you’ve
obviously been awake most of the night. From what I’ve heard you didn’t know
Wolfson all that well. I can’t see you sitting around all night mourning him. I
figure you pored over the paper as if it were one of your old books. Frankly,
I’m not very interested in hanging you out to dry for stealing printout. It
would be a small-potatoes crime in any case. Besides, for someone like you it
must be punishment enough to know just how stupidly you’ve acted in all this.”
I did feel stupid, but I resented Stengley’s tone. “I’m
sorry I violated the letter of the law, doctor, but I don’t see why you have to
be abusive about it. After all, I
was just trying to protect a friend.”
“O come now. You took the note because you were fascinated
by the whole thing. Evidently you like secrets.”
“I don’t deny my own curiosity in this affair. After all, my
profession, like yours, is about finding things out. In any case, I didn’t want
the truth about Bill Wolfson.”
“Just you, ey?” Stengley regarded me narrowly. “Maybe you
should know the whole story. You were willing to steal evidence out of your
scientific love of secretes. Let’s see how well you like this one.”
At this, the coroner unlocked a drawer in his desk and took
out a videotape. He led me unprotesting into an inner room and put the cassette
in a player. I should have been reluctant to see the tape; in fact, I was full
of guilty eagerness.
The tape was surprisingly long. Wolfson had turned on the
camera early to capture all of his preparations. He went about his business in
complete calm, making sure that the angles were right so that the tape machine
would catch everything, even positioning a clock on the shelf beyond the chair.
Finally set himself down, very carefully loaded the shot gun and showed it to
the lens, leaned back, inserted the muzzle in his mouth, and pulled both
triggers in what you’d have to call a matter-of -fact way. There was a loud
report and a huge volume of smoke pored from Wolfson’s mouth. Behind his head,
the wall was peppered with shot. Bill sat up bolt upright and coughed
furiously. Presently the cough turned into an uncontrollable laugh as Bill
looked full on at the camera. His eyes were glowing and smoke continued to
issue from his powder-stained smile.
For a moment he seemed to lose himself in thought. Then he
reached for the cartridge box on the table. Very deliberately, he reloaded the
gun, sat back down, put the muzzle in his mouth, and again pulled the triggers.
His death was so instantaneous that it wasn’t even frightening: one moment a
lanky, forty-year old scientist was settling himself in a chair and the next
all that remained was a motionless, partly decapitated corpse.
After a few minutes I rushed in. You could see my eyes get
very big, but what actually embarrassed me the most how quickly the expression
drained from my face once the sheer impact of the scene had faded. Obviously,
because I hadn’t noticed the video machine, I hadn’t bothered to register any
emotion at all except perhaps a lingering note of surprise. Because I though
myself unseen, I had the blank look of a man blind from birth. Eventually I
noticed the camera was on and turned it off.
I stared at the screen for a long time after it had gone
black. When I finally looked
around, I saw Stingley sitting rigidly in his char with an exasperated look on
his smooth face. “I expect I don’t need to tell you to keep quiet about all
this. Was it enough of a secret for you?”