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Hugh Everett III

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Hugh Everett III
Born(1930-11-11)November 11, 1930
Washington, D.C., U.S.
DiedJuly 19, 1982(1982-07-19) (aged 51)
McLean, Virginia, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
Alma materThe Catholic University of America, Princeton University
Known forMany-worlds interpretation, quantum physics
Scientific career
FieldsPhysicist
InstitutionsInstitute for Defense Analyses, Monowave Corporation
Doctoral advisorJohn Archibald Wheeler
Notes

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 called his "relative state" formulation.

Discouraged by the "scorn"[1] other physicists heaped on MWI, Everett left physics after completing his Ph.D. Afterwards, he developed the use of generalized Lagrange multipliers in operations research and applied this commercially as a defense analyst and a consultant. He was married to Nancy Everett née Gore, with two children: Elizabeth Everett and Mark Oliver Everett, frontman of the 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 in 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 started his studies at Princeton in the Mathematics Department working on the then-new field of game theory, but slowly drifted into physics. In 1953 he started taking his first physics courses, notably Introductory Quantum Mechanics with Robert Dicke.

Many-worlds at Princeton and afterwards

For his second term at Princeton, starting in 1954, he moved into the Physics Department. His main course that year was Methods of Mathematical Physics with Eugene Wigner, although he stayed active in math and presented a paper on military game theory in December. He passed his general exams 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 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[2] later retitled as The Theory of the Universal Wave Function, and eventually defended his thesis after some delay in the spring of 1957. 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, appeared in Reviews of Modern Physics Vol 29 #3 454-462, (July 1957), accompanied by a supportive review by Wheeler. The physics world took little note. Everett had already left academia for defence work (see next section).

Everett's long dissertation paper was typed up by the departmental secretary at Princeton, Nancy Gore, whom Everett married the next year.[3][4]

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 simply unable to communicate the core idea that the wavefunction should be regarded as a real classical field; this was simply heresy to Bohr and the others at Copenhagen. The conceptual gulf between their positions was simply too wide to allow any meeting of minds; Léon Rosenfeld, one of Bohr's followers, talking about Everett's visit, described Everett as being "undescribably stupid and could not under-stand the simplest things in quantum mechanics". Everett later described this experience as "hell...doomed from the beginning"[5].

In 1962 Everett accepted an invitation to present the relative-state formulation (as it was still called) at a conference on the foundations of quantum mechanics held at the Xavier University of Cincinnati.[5] Amongst his exposition Everett presented his derivation of probability and also explicitly stated that observers in all branches of the wavefunction were equally valid. 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

Everett's attendance marked a transition from academia to the commercial world

Upon graduation in September 1956, Everett was invited to join the Pentagon's newly-forming Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG), run by the Institute for Defense Analyses. Between 23 - 26 October 1956 he attended a weapons orientation course run by Sandia National Laboratories at Albuquerque, New Mexico to learn about nuclear weapons and became a fan of computer modelling while there. In 1957 he became director of the WSEG's Department of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. After a short break to defend his thesis on quantum theory at Princeton Everett returned to WSEG and recommenced his research, most of which 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.[6][7]

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 optimization that would later lead to financial success.

In August 1964 the Defense Research Corporation (DRC) spun off the Lambda Division to apply military modeling solutions to various civilian problems. Everett left the WSEG and became the head of the new Division, along with a million dollar budget. The next year they took the division public as Lambda Corporation, a think tank that returned primarily to military research. After three years he stepped down as president in order to focus on research, as by this point the company was growing so rapidly that administration duties were interfering. In the early 1970s the defense budgets were curtailed and most money went to operational duties in the Vietnam War, leading to Lambda eventually being re-purchased by the DRC, now known as General Research Corp.

In 1973 Everett left Lambda to form DBS Corporation in Arlington, Virginia, a computer consulting firm. Much of their work appears to have been in statistical analysis. He appears to have enjoyed programming, and spent the rest of his life working at DBS. He also opened Monowave Corporation with several DBS and family friends.

Later recognition

In 1970 Bryce DeWitt wrote an article for Physics Today on Everett's relative-state theory, which evoked a number of letters from physicists. These letters, and DeWitt's responses to the technical objections raised, were also published. Meanwhile DeWitt, who had corresponded with Everett on the many-worlds / relative state interpretation when originally published in 1957, started editing an anthology on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. In addition to the original articles by Everett and Wheeler, the anthology was dominated by the inclusion of Everett's 1956 paper The Theory of the Universal Wavefunction, which had never been published before. The book was published late in 1973, sold out, and it was not long before an article on Everett's work appeared in the science fiction magazine, Analog. Everett spent some time tracking down a copy of the Analog article.[5]

In 1977, Everett was invited to give a talk at a conference Wheeler had organised at Wheeler's new location at the University of Texas at Austin. As with the Copenhagen trip, Everett took a vacation from his defense work and travelled with his family. Everett met Bryce DeWitt there for the first and only time. Everett's talk was quite well received and influenced a number of physicists in the audience[5], including Wheeler’s graduate student, David Deutsch, who later promoted the many-worlds interpretation to a wider audience.[5] Everett, who "never wavered in his belief in his many-worlds theory"[8], 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 setting up 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 see his own name linked with Everett's ideas. Eventually, after Everett's death he formally renounced the theory.[5][9]

Death and legacy

Everett, who believed in quantum immortality[10], died suddenly at home on[3] his bed during the night of July 18/19, 1982, of a heart attack at the age of 51. Everett's obesity, constant chain-smoking and heavy drinking[3] almost certainly contributed to this, although he was outwardly healthy at the time. A committed atheist [citation needed], he had asked to be thrown out with the trash after his death. His wife kept his ashes in an urn for a few years, before complying with his wishes.

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

Everett's daughter, Elizabeth, suffered from schizophrenia 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 lead singer and songwriter for the band Eels. The Eels album Electro-Shock Blues, which was written during this time period, is reflective of these deaths. Mark explored his father's work in the hour-long BBC television documentary "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives".[11][12][13][14] The program was edited and shown on the PBS Nova series in the USA in October 2008.[15][16][17]

See also

Wikiquote has quotations related to Hugh Everett III.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Hugh Everett III.

Footnotes

  1. ^ "The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett" by Peter Byrne, from Scientific American, December 2007
  2. ^ Fabio Freitas, Os estados relativos de Hugh Everett III: uma análise histórica e conceitual. Programa de Pós-Graducação em Ensino, Filosofia e História das Ciências. 2007 [1]
  3. ^ a b c Mark Oliver Everett, Things the Grandchildren Should Know, ISBN 978-0-316-02787-8
  4. ^ Eugene Shikhovtsev, Biographical Sketch of Hugh Everett, III, Eugene Shikhovtsev's Biography of Everett, maintained by Max Tegmark
  5. ^ a b c d e f 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
  6. ^ Hugh Everett III and 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, D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, 1959.
  7. ^ Cf. Dr. Linus Pauling Nobel Peace Prize 1962 lecture (and reprinted in Peace by Frederick W. Haberman, Irwin Abrams, Tore Frängsmyr, Nobelstiftelsen, Nobelstiftelsen (Stockholm), published by World Scientific, 1997 ISBN 9810234163), delivered on December 11, 1963, in which he mentioned the work by Pugh and Everett regarding the risks of nuclear profliferation and even quoted them from 1959. Pauling said: "This is a small nuclear attack made with use of about one percent of the existing weapons. A major nuclear war might well see a total of 30,000 megatons, one-tenth of the estimated stockpiles, delivered and exploded over the populated regions of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the other major European countries. The studies of Hugh Everett and George E. Pugh [21], of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Division, Institute of Defense Analysis, Washington, D.C., reported in the 1959 Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation, permit us to make an estimate of the casualties of such a war. This estimate is that sixty days after the day on which the war was waged, 720 million of the 800 million people in these countries would be dead, sixty million would be alive but severely injured, and there would be twenty million other survivors. The fate of the living is suggested by the following statement by Everett and Pugh: 'Finally, it must be pointed out that the total casualties at sixty days may not be indicative of the ultimate casualties. Such delayed effects as the disorganization of society, disruption of communications, extinction of livestock, genetic damage, and the slow development of radiation poisoning from the ingestion of radioactive materials may significantly increase the ultimate toll.' ..."
  8. ^ Aldhous, Peter (2007-11-24), "Parallel lives can never touch", New Scientist, no. 2631, retrieved 2007-11-21 .
  9. ^ Gardner, Martin (2003). "Multiverses and Blackberries". Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-05742-9. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  10. ^ See Keith Lynch's recollections in Eugene Shikhovtsev's Biography of Everett[2]
  11. ^ Last night's TV: Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, Nancy Banks-Smith, Guardian blog, 27 November 2007.
  12. ^ Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives BBC Four documentary about Eels founder Mark Everett and his father, Band Weblogs, 16 November 2007.
  13. ^ "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives", BBC Press Release
  14. ^ "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives", BBC iPlayer
  15. ^ Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives", PBS Nova TV program, October 2008.
  16. ^ Healy, Pat, "‘Nova’ came for his soul: Eels front man on the healing power of a science doc about his dad", Metro newspaper, October 21, 2008.
  17. ^ Hugh Everett: New film tackles "many worlds" theory of quantum mechanics 60 second science, Scientific American blog, by Jordan Lite and George Musser

Many-worlds references

Operations research references

  • Hugh Everett III, "Generalized Lagrange Multiplier Method For Solving Problems of Optimum Allocation of Resources", Operations Research, vol 11, (1963), pp 399–417
  • 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

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