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Hugh Everett III

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Hugh Everett III

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Also known as Hugh Everett

US physicist and discoverer of the relative-state interpretation of quantum mechanics

Quotes

  • Quantum mechanics is reformulated, in a way which eliminates its present dependence on the special treatment of observation of a system by an external observer.
  • As an analogy one can imagine an intelligent amoeba with a good memory. As time progresses the amoeba is constantly splitting, each time the resulting amoebas having the same memories as the parent. Our amoeba hence does not have a life line, but a life tree.
  • The physical "reality" is assumed to be the wave function of the whole universe itself.
  • [The Many-worlds interpretation is the] only completely coherent approach to explaining both the contents of quantum mechanics and the appearance of the world.

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Key facts

Born
( 1930-11-11 ) November 11, 1930, Washington, D.C. , U.S.
Died
July 19, 1982 (1982-07-19) (aged 51), McLean, Virginia , U.S.
Alma mater
Catholic University of America , Princeton University (PhD)
Known for
Many-worlds interpretation , Everett's theorem
Children
Elizabeth Everett, Mark Oliver Everett
Fields
Physics , Operations research , Optimization , Game theory
Institutions
Institute for Defense Analyses , American Management Systems , Monowave Corporation
Thesis
On the foundations of quantum mechanics (1957)
Doctoral advisor
John Archibald Wheeler

via Wikipedia infobox

~17 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Hugh Everett III (/ˈɛvərɪt/; November 11, 1930 – July 19, 1982) was an American physicist who proposed the relative state interpretation of quantum mechanics. This influential approach later became the basis of the many-worlds interpretation (MWI). Everett's theory dropped the wave function collapse postulate of quantum measurement theory, incorporating the observer in the same quantum state as the observation result. The quantum statistic becomes a measure of the branching of the universal wave function.

Although largely disregarded until near the end of his life, Everett's work received more credibility with the discovery of quantum decoherence in the 1970s and has received increased attention in recent decades, with MWI becoming one of the important interpretations of quantum mechanics.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Hugh Everett III” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.