Hugh Everett III

Coordinates	37°31′08″N094°27′55″N
Name	Hugh Everett III
Caption	Hugh Everett in 1964
Birth date	November 11, 1930
Birth place	Washington, D.C., U.S.
Death date	July 19, 1982
Death place	McLean, Virginia, U.S.
Residence	U.S.
Nationality	American
Field	Physics Operations research (Optimization, Game theory)
Work institution	Institute for Defense Analyses, Monowave Corporation
Alma mater	The Catholic University of America, Princeton University
Doctoral advisor	John Archibald Wheeler
Known for	Many-worlds interpretation, quantum physics, Everett's theorem, Stochastic games
Religion	Atheist
Footnotes	Father of Mark Oliver Everett

Hugh Everett III (November 11, 1930 – July 19, 1982) was an American physicist who first proposed the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics, which he termed his "relative state" formulation.

Discouraged by the scorn of other physicists for MWI, Everett ended his physics career after completing his Ph.D. Afterwards, he developed the use of generalized Lagrange multipliers for operations research and applied this commercially as a defense analyst and a consultant. He was married to Nancy Everett née Gore. They had two children: Elizabeth Everett and Mark Oliver Everett, who became frontman of the musical band Eels.

Early life and education

Everett was born in and raised in the Washington, D.C. area. After World War II, Everett's father was stationed in West Germany, and Hugh visited Leipzig in East Germany during 1949. He graduated from The Catholic University of America in 1953 in chemical engineering, and then received a National Science Foundation fellowship that allowed him to attend Princeton University. He matriculated at Princeton in the Physics Department but spent much of his first year in Fine Hall working on the then-new field of game theory. His first year, he attended Introductory Quantum Mechanics with Robert Dicke.

Many-worlds at Princeton and afterwards

During 1954, he attended Methods of Mathematical Physics with Eugene Wigner, although he remained active with mathematics and presented a paper on military game theory in December. He passed his general examinations in the spring of 1955, thereby gaining his Master's degree, and then started work on his dissertation that would (much) later make him famous. He switched thesis advisors to John Archibald Wheeler some time in 1955, wrote a couple of short papers on quantum theory and completed his long paper, Wave Mechanics Without Probability in April 1956 later retitled as The Theory of the Universal Wave Function, and eventually defended his thesis after some delay in the spring of 1957. Wheeler himself had traveled to Copenhagen in 1956 with the goal of reaching a favorable reception to at least part of Everett's work, in vain. A short article, which was a compromise between Everett and Wheeler about how to present the concept and almost identical to the final version of his thesis, was published in Reviews of Modern Physics Vol 29 #3 454-462, (July 1957), accompanied by an approving review by Wheeler. Physicists took little note. Everett had already ended academia for defense work (see next section).

Everett's long dissertation paper was typed by his paramour, Nancy Gore, whom Everett married the next year.

During March and April 1959, at Wheeler's request, Everett visited Copenhagen, on vacation with his wife and baby daughter, in order to meet with Niels Bohr, the "father of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics". The visit was a complete disaster; Everett was unable to communicate the main idea that the universe is describable, in theory, by an objectively existing universal wave function (which does not "collapse"); this was simply heresy to Bohr and the others at Copenhagen. The conceptual gulf between their positions was too wide to allow any meeting of minds; Léon Rosenfeld, one of Bohr's devotees, talking about Everett's visit, described Everett as being "undescribably stupid and could not understand the simplest things in quantum mechanics". Everett later described this experience as "hell...doomed from the beginning". Amongst his exposition Everett presented his derivation of probability and also stated explicitly that observers in all branches of the wavefunction were equally "real." He also agreed with an observation from the floor that the number of branches of the universal wavefunction was an uncountable infinity.

Career in defense and consulting

Upon graduation in September 1956, Everett was invited to join the Pentagon's newly-forming Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG), managed by the Institute for Defense Analyses. Between 23–26 October 1956 he attended a weapons orientation course managed by Sandia National Laboratories at Albuquerque, New Mexico to learn about nuclear weapons and became a fan of computer modeling while there. In 1957, he became director of the WSEG's Department of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. After a brief intermission to defend his thesis on quantum theory at Princeton Everett returned to WSEG and recommenced his research, much of which, but by no means all, remains classified. It is known that he worked on various studies of the Minuteman missile project, which was then starting, as well as The Distribution and Effects of Fallout in Large Nuclear Weapon Campaigns.

During March and April 1959, while on vacation in Copenhagen in his hotel he started work on a new idea to use generalized Lagrange multipliers for mathematical optimization. Everett's theorem relates the Lagrangian bidual to the primal problem. enjoyed the presentation (this was the first time for years he had talked about his quantum work in public). Wheeler started the process of returning Everett to a physics career by establishing a new research institute in California, but nothing came of this proposal. Wheeler, although happy to introduce Everett's ideas to a wider audience, was not happy to have his own name associated with Everett's ideas. Eventually, after Everett's death he formally renounced the theory.

Death and legacy

Everett, who believed in quantum immortality,

Of the companies Everett initiated, only Monowave Corporation still exists (in Seattle as of November 2007) and is still managed by co-founder Elaine Tsiang.

Everett's daughter, Elizabeth, suffered from manic depression and committed suicide in 1996 (saying in her suicide note that she was going to a parallel universe to be with her father), and in 1998, his wife, Nancy, died of cancer. Everett's son, Mark Oliver Everett, who found Everett dead, is also known as "E" and is the main singer and songwriter for the band Eels. The Eels album Electro-Shock Blues, which was written during this time period, is representative of these deaths. Mark explored his father's work in the hour-long BBC television documentary Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives. The program was edited and shown on the Public Broadcasting Service's Nova series in the USA during October 2008.

See also

Bryce DeWitt

David Deutsch

Modal realism

References

Many-worlds references

Hugh Everett III "The Theory of the Universal Wavefunction", Manuscript (1955), pp 3–140 of Bryce DeWitt, R. Neill Graham, eds, The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton Series in Physics, Princeton University Press (1973), ISBN 0-691-08131-X The original and most comprehensive paper on many-worlds. Investigates and recasts the foundations of quantum theory in information theoretic terms, before moving on to consider the nature of interactions, observation, entropy, irreversible processes, classical objects etc.

Stefano Osnaghi, Fabio Freitas, Olival Freire Jr, The Origin of the Everettian Heresy, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 40(2009)97–123. A study of the painful three-way relationship between Hugh Everett, John A Wheeler and Niels Bohr and how this affected the early development of the many-worlds theory.

Operations research references

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Hugh Everett III, George E Pugh, "The Distribution and Effects of Fallout in Large Nuclear-Weapon Campaigns", Operations Research, vol. 7, (1959), pp. 226–248

Biographical sources

The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family by Peter Byrne, ISBN 978-0-19-955227-6, Nature review

Eugene Shikhovtsev's Biography of Everett

John Archibald Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam, ISBN 0-393-31991-1. pp 268–270

Interview: Parallel lives can never touch, Mark Oliver Everett talking to Peter Aldhous, New Scientist, 24 November 2007.

Are we closer to a 'theory of everything'? Susan Watts interview with Stephen Hawking and Mark Oliver Everett, Wednesday, 8 September 2010

Mark Oliver Everett, Things the Grandchildren Should Know, ISBN 978-0-316-02787-8

Clipmarks article

Category:1930 births Category:1982 deaths Category:American mathematicians Category:American physicists Category:American atheists Category:Operations researchers Category:The Catholic University of America alumni Category:Princeton University alumni Category:Thermodynamicists Category:Philosophers of science Category:Quantum physicists Category:Theoretical physicists