Inheritance of the cool

So I just found out that the lead singer of the Eels, an incredibly cool band, is the son of Hugh Everett III, creator of the incredibly cool Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics*. The other night I saw the NOVA episode on the father and son, "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives," and it was very well done. Mark Everett is an odd duck, but enjoyable, and his music features heavily throughout. Fascinating location shots in Princeton dorms, classrooms, and archives, and archival footage and audio recordings from key physics players in the 50s, made me very jealous of what it must have been like to be a physicist at that time.

I also managed to download Hugh Everett's dissertation, the resulting paper, and his advisor John Wheeler's accompanying paper. Hopefully I'll have a chance to read them soon!

*Also, his cousin was a flight attendant on the 9/11 plane that hit the Pentagon, another weird link in this guy's family. It's strange how certain people seem to have a disproportionate number of links to significant people and events--although I may just be acutely cognizant of it at the moment, as I'm reading Malcolm Gladwell's excellent books, which thoroughly describe the links permeating society.