On who invented quantum suicide, the following is from the biography of
Hugh Everett by Eugene B. Shikhovtsev and Kenneth W. Ford, at
http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/everett/
"Atheist or not, 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 --- and so on ad
infinitum. (Sadly, Everett's daughter Liz, in her later suicide note, said
she was going to a parallel universe to be with her father...)"
The reference is to Everett's views in 1979-80, but there is no reason to
suppose that Everett had only just thought of it at the time. On a
personal note, some time in the '80s I met one of Everett's co-workers who
told me that Everett used to justify his very unhealthy lifestyle on
exactly these grounds. In our world, Everett died of a heart attack aged
52.
I have always assumed that John Bell was thinking along these lines when
he commented on Everett's theory:
"But if such a theory was taken seriously it would hardly be possible to
take anything else seriously." (1981, reprinted in _Speakable &
Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics).
For that matter, this idea is implicit in Borges' story "The Garden of
Forking Paths" (written before 1941), which provides the epigraph to the
DeWitt & Graham anthology on The Many Worlds Interpretation.
======================================================
Dr J. P. Leahy, University of Manchester,
Jodrell Bank Observatory, School of Physics & Astronomy,
Macclesfield, Cheshire SK11 9DL, UK
Tel - +44 1477 572636, Fax - +44 1477 571618
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Received on Wed May 10 2006 - 18:14:19 PDT