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Hugh Everett III
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US physicist and discoverer of the relative-state interpretation of quantum mechanics
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
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- human
- Given name
- Hugh
- Family name
- Everett
- Gender
- male
- Citizenship
- United States
- Place of birth
- Washington, D.C.
- Place of death
- McLean
- Child
- Mark Oliver Everett
- Occupation
- theoretical physicist
- Languages spoken
- English language
- Religion
- atheism
- Doctoral advisor
- John Archibald Wheeler
- Student of
- John Archibald Wheeler
- Field of work
- quantum mechanics
- Residence
- United States
Show 9 more facts
- cause of death
- myocardial infarction
- date of birth
- 1930-11-11
- date of death
- 1982-07-19
- Erdős number
- 2
- manner of death
- natural causes
- name in native language
- Hugh Everett III
- archives at
- University of California, Irvine
- maintained by WikiProject
- WikiProject Mathematics
- Commons category
- Hugh Everett III
Sources (13)
via Wikidata · CC0
~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.