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Hugh Everett III
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US physicist and discoverer of the relative-state interpretation of quantum mechanics
OverviewAI-generated
Hugh Everett III (1930–1982) was an American mathematician and theoretical physicist. Born in Washington, D.C., he was educated at The Catholic University of America and Princeton University, where his doctoral advisor was John Archibald Wheeler. His field of work was quantum mechanics. He died of a myocardial infarction in McLean.
Everett was an atheist and spoke English. He had an Erdős number of 2 and is the father of Mark Oliver Everett. His written works number five. A quote attributed to him states, "The physical 'reality' is assumed to be the wave function of the whole universe itself."
Synthesized by Vinony from 29 facts across 5 sources: Wikidata, Crossref, MusicBrainz, Wikiquote, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
- ROBINS-I: a tool for assessing risk of bias in non-randomised studies of interventions
· 2016 · cited 15,478x
- Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
· 2016 · cited 11,706x
- Global, regional, and national incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability for 354 diseases and injuries for 195 countries and territories, 1990–2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017
· 2018 · cited 10,999x
- The mutational constraint spectrum quantified from variation in 141,456 humans
· 2020 · cited 9,186x
- Analysis of protein-coding genetic variation in 60,706 humans
· 2016 · cited 9,063x
via Crossref · CC0
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.