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I’ve liked the band Eels ever since I listened to their Beautiful Freak album ten years or so ago. I’ve never seen them live, but they’re touring now so I might try to catch them.

The reason why I mention this somewhat tedious factoid is that I just saw a trailer on BBC4 for a forthcoming doc about Eels frontman Mark Oliver Everett. It turns out that his father was Hugh Everett – he of the Everett-Wheeler-Graham school of quantum physics.

Robert Anton Wilson’s bloody marvellous Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy is what first got me interested in quantum physics. Here’s how he described the Everett-Wheeler-Graham model in the appendix:

An alternative to Bell’s Theorem and the Copenhagen Interpretation. According to Everett, Wheeler & Graham, everything that can happen to the state vector does happen to it.

To put it another way, then, the father of the frontman of the Eels’ was the brains behind the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. That’s mad, that is. It’s positively buggier than batshit.

Incidentally, I first read RAW’s Schrödingers Cat Trilogy at about the same time as I was first listening to Eels’ Beautiful Freaks album.

Typical, huh?