Hugh Everett

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Hugh Everett III [ hjuː ˈɛvərɪt ] (born November 11, 1930 in Washington, DC - † July 19, 1982 in McLean , Virginia ) was an American physicist who, in connection with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics , which on his work is declining, has become known.

Life

Everett grew up in Washington, DC . He attended St. John's College High School , a military private school, and began studying chemical engineering at the Catholic University of America , which he graduated in 1953. He had also studied mathematics on the side. In 1949 he visited his father in Germany for a year. During the Second World War he was Lieutenant Colonel (Lieutenant Colonel) in the General Staff of the 5th Army of the US Army in Italy and later in West Germany. He then began studying physics at Princeton , with Eugene Wigner and John Archibald Wheeler , among others . In 1955 he completed his master's degree and received his doctorate in 1956 with John Archibald Wheeler, where he introduced the multi-world interpretation of quantum mechanics in his dissertation The Theory of the Universal Wave Function , which, however, immediately encountered resistance because it contradicted the then prevailing Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which was essentially formulated by Niels Bohr . Wheeler, who was closely associated with Bohr, had the first version of Everett's dissertation shortened and revised after receiving a negative response from Bohr on a visit to Copenhagen in May 1956. The doctoral committee recognized in April 1957 an abridged version of the original dissertation - now under the new title "On the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics" , so that Everett received his doctorate in June 1957. In the abridged version, the dissertation lost much of its persuasiveness. It was shortened again and appeared in 1957 under the title The relative state formulation of quantum mechanics in the Reviews of Modern Physics. The work received mostly negative feedback. But physicists like Wheeler kept returning to their basic ideas. In March and April 1959, Everett visited Niels Bohr in Copenhagen while on vacation, but met with complete rejection. The theory found its first revival in 1970 in a Physics Today essay by Bryce S. DeWitt , who also published an anthology in 1973 with the complete original version of Everett's dissertation. In 1977 Everett gave a lecture on his many-worlds interpretation at a conference organized by Wheeler at the University of Texas at Austin .

Everett turned away from physics even before he graduated. In 1956 he started working for the newly established Weapons System Evaluation Group (WSEG) of the US Department of Defense (assigned to the Institute for Defense Analyzes ). Among other things, he worked on studies on large-scale fallout after wars with nuclear weapons. He was head of the mathematics and physics department at WSEG before moving to the Lambda Division of Defense Research Corporation in Arlington County in 1964 , which also advised on the civil sector. Just one year later he founded his own company, the Lambda Corporation .

In the spring of 1959 he presented a generalized Lagrange multiplier method (also known as the Everett algorithm) for solving complex logistical problems in operations research , which he used extensively both in his military research and later as a management consultant.

Everett founded a number of companies in the 1960s and 1970s, after Lambda Corporation, for example. B. 1973 the DBS Corporation in Arlington and later the Monowave Corporation , together with Elaine Tsiang (later Elaine Tsiang Reisner), a former employee of Everett at Lambda Corporation, who had studied physics with Bryce DeWitt. Most of his later companies dealt with software development or advised in the computer field. These ventures made Everett a millionaire. Today, of the companies founded by Everett, only the Monowave Corporation (today based in Seattle, Washington State ) still exists . She deals with speech recognition.

For most of his professional career, he lived in Fairfax County , Virginia. Everett, who was a heavy drinker, chain smoker, and severely overweight in later years, died of a heart attack in his sleep. A committed atheist, he had asked that his remains be thrown away in the trash after his death. His wife kept his ashes in an urn in a filing cabinet in the dining room for several years before granting his request.

Hugh Everett was married to Nancy Gore from 1957 until his death . His son Mark Oliver Everett (* 1963) is the founder of the rock band Eels . He reported about his father in the BBC documentary Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives . The daughter Elizabeth (* 1957) was manically depressed and committed suicide in 1996 - in her suicide note she expressed the wish that her ashes, like those of her father, could also be scattered over the garbage so that they might end up in the right parallel universe, to meet her father there .

literature

  • Peter Byrne: The Parallel Worlds of Hugh Everett. In: Spectrum of Science. 2008, issue 4.
  • Peter Byrne: Many Worlds - Hugh Everett III - a family drama set between the cold war and quantum physics. ( The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III ) Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg 2012, ISBN 978-3-642-25179-5 .
  • Stefano Osnaghi, Fabio Freitas, Olival Freire: The origin of the Everettian Heresy. In: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. 2008 pdf

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The relative state formulation of quantum mechanics. In: Reviews of Modern Physics. Volume 29, 1957, pp. 454-462, with a comment by Wheeler, pp. 463-365.
  2. ^ DeWitt: Quantum mechanics and reality. In: Physics Today. September 1970.
  3. ^ Bryce S. DeWitt, R. Neill Graham (Eds.): The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Princeton University Press, 1973.
  4. ^ Hugh Everett, George E. Pugh: The Distribution and Effects of Fallout in Large Nuclear-Weapon Campaigns. In: Biological and Environment Effects of Nuclear War. Hearings Before the Special Sub-Committee on Radiation of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, June 22-26, 1959, Washington, DC, United States Government Printing Office , 1959, and Operations Research, Volume 7, 1959, p. 226 -248.
  5. ^ Everett: Generalized Lagrange multiplier method for solving problems of optimum allocation of resources. Operations Research, Vol. 11, 1963, pp. 399-417.
  6. ↑ Shikhovtsev Everett's business of the 1970s
  7. ^ Peter Byrne: The many worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple universes, mutual assured destruction, and the meltdown of a nuclear family . Oxford University Press, New York 2010, ISBN 978-0-19-955227-6 , pp. 347 (436 p., Limited preview in Google Book search).
  8. ↑ https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b008d2zj
  9. ↑ Biography of Peter Byrne and his Scientific American article on Everett
personal data
SURNAME Everett, Hugh
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hugh Everett III
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH November 11, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Washington, DC
DATE OF DEATH July 19, 1982
Place of death McLean