A few nights ago on PBS, I came across (sadly, halfway into it) a BBC documentary about Hugh Everett III, called "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives." Everett's son is a musician and the only surviving family member available to manage Everett's papers and legacy. Everett is credited with creating the many-worlds interpretation to solve a problem in quantum mechanics, but was not appreciated during the fifties when he wrote this theory. He died shortly after he was beginning to be recognized and appreciated for his work, and never lived to experience the respect he is now accorded by many scientists. Anyway, this revived my interest in quantum mechanics which I half began reading about 3 summers ago when I read a Brian Greene book and a book by Amit Goswami called The Conscious Universe. I was so taken with the spooky quantum effects I learned about, as I was able to understand them in my limited way, and still am interested. So I read the NYT review of Quantum by Manjit Kumar, and with a good friend's BN discount card in hand, bought the store's only copy last night and began reading. Right now, I am learning about Max Planck and the blackbody experiment. Stay tuned.
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