"Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives" is not your usual edition of "Nova," the PBS science anthology. The film, which airs tonight, follows rock musician Mark Oliver Everett -- better known as E, leader of Eels -- on a journey to discover the physicist father he never really knew and to understand something of his "Many Worlds Interpretation" of quantum mechanics -- at first, painfully ignored, but now taken quite seriously.
It might be called a biographical mystery. Filmed with animated sequences and visual conceits more familiar from rockumentaries and music videos, the story itself is like an episode of "This American Life." (In fact, it's been imported from the BBC.)
There is not all that much science in it, or just enough science to give you a sense of what strange and heady stuff Hugh Everett III was into. (There is some oddly elementary information in it as well: atoms, we learn, for example, are "microscopic particles that make up everything we see around us, from houses and guitars to rock musicians." Cute.) It is more a story of scientists, and how they are, as Mark Everett visits his father's old haunts and colleagues and meets his younger followers. But more than that, it's a story of coming to grips with history and oneself.
Mark is the last of the Everetts, surviving a schizophrenic sister who killed herself and a mother dead from cancer. Hugh died of a heart attack in 1982 at age 51; a teenaged Mark discovered the body, which brought the two into unprecedented physical contact; he calls it their "one really intimate experience."
Having once read halfway through Brian Greene's "The Fabric of the Cosmos," the ideas here weren't completely unfamiliar to me. Big things in the universe act differently from the really tiny ones, and on the tiny level, particles are thought to exist as probabilities whose properties are settled only when someone looks at them.
OK, that's weird, right? Hugh Everett sought to deal with this and other attendant paradoxes of quantum mechanics with a mathematically stable theory in which every action creates separate worlds: one in which the action takes place and one in which it does not. OK, that's weird too.
Is every road not taken worth its own world? Does every typographical error I make create a world in which I made none? For that matter, does every word I spell correctly imply a world in which I spelled it wrong? And is there a different world for every possible misspelling? A world for "whirld"? Another for "wurled"? And where do you put them all?
