Just watched an amazing documentary on the theories of Hugh Everett and a son’s quest to connect with his deceased father.

The Nova documentary, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, follows Mark Everett (aka E from the band Eels) on a quest to find out who his father really was some 26 years after his premature death.

Specifically, the documentary highlights Hugh Everett’s controversial theory of Many Worlds (or Parallel Worlds) which he wrote for his Ph.D. dissertation in 1957. Unfortunately, Hugh Everett’s revolutionary theory was shunned by academia and influential scientists such as Neils Bohr and was forgotten for many years. It wasn’t until the mid 1970s, with the help of a few fringe physicists, that Hugh Everett’s theory began to pick up steam as a possible working model to explain some of the basic principles by which our known universe exists. Almost 20 years after the original theory, Hugh Everett was finally getting the respect he deserved from the Physicist community.

While watching Parallel Worlds, I really enjoyed the intimate connection I felt as Mark Everett traveled around America to better understand his father and some of the unfortunate events in his young life that caused him to become distant and disconnected from his family. The emotional journey that follows as Mark Everett talks to some of his father’s colleagues and tries to better understand the ground breaking theory his Dad presented to the world back in 1957 is some of the best television I’ve ever watched.