Hugh Everett III

Hugh Everett III (; 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.

Everett also helped found small companies specializing in contracts with the U.S. government.

Early life and education Hugh Everett III was born in 1930 and raised in the Washington, D.C. area. His parents separated when he was young. Initially raised by his mother (Katherine Lucille Everett, née Kennedy), he was raised by his father (Hugh Everett, Jr.) and stepmother (Sarah Everett, née Thrift) from the age of seven.

Everett won a half scholarship to St. John's College High School in Washington, D.C. From there, he moved to the nearby Catholic University of America to study chemical engineering as an undergraduate. There, he read about Dianetics in Astounding Science Fiction. Although he never exhibited interest in Scientology (which Dianetics became), he retained a distrust of conventional medicine throughout his life.

In his third year at Princeton, Everett moved into an apartment he shared with three friends he had made during his first year, Hale Trotter, Harvey Arnold and Charles Misner. Arnold later described Everett as follows:

He was smart in a very broad way. I mean, to go from chemical engineering to mathematics to physics and spending most of the time buried in a science fiction book, I mean, this is talent. The paper was later retitled "The Theory of the Universal Wave Function".

Wheeler traveled to Copenhagen in May 1956 with the goal of getting a favorable reception for at least part of Everett's work, but in vain.

Career In danger of losing his draft deferment, Everett took a research job with the Pentagon the year before completing the oral exam for his PhD and did not continue research in theoretical physics after his graduation. He started defense work in the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG) in June 1956. Completing his PhD within a year of starting at WSEG was a job requirement, and in April 1957 he returned briefly to Princeton to defend his thesis. The oral examination took place on April 23. The principal examiners—Wheeler, Valentine Bargmann, H. W. Wyld, and Dicke—concluded: "The candidate passed a very good examination. He dealt with a very difficult subject and defended his conclusions firmly, clearly, and logically. He shows marked mathematical ability, keenness in logic analyses, and a high ability to express himself well."

A short article, which was a compromise between Everett and Wheeler about how to present the many-worlds concept and almost identical to the final version of his thesis, was published in Reviews of Modern Physics, accompanied by a favorable review by Wheeler. Everett was not happy with the article's final form.

During March and April 1959, Everett visited Copenhagen at Wheeler's request in order to meet with Niels Bohr, the "father of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics". The visit was a complete disaster; Bohr "rejected Everett’s approach as a whole, defending the Copenhagen approach to measurement". The conceptual gulf between their positions was too wide to allow any meeting of minds; Léon Rosenfeld, one of Bohr's devotees, called Everett "undescribably stupid" and said he "could not understand the simplest things in quantum mechanics". Everett later described this experience as "hell...doomed from the beginning".

In August 1964, Everett and several WSEG colleagues started Lambda Corp. to apply military modeling solutions to various civilian problems. During the early 1970s, defense budgets were curtailed and most money went to operational duties in the Vietnam War, resulting in Lambda eventually being absorbed by the General Research Corp.

In 1973, Everett and Donald Reisler (a Lambda colleague and fellow physicist) left the firm to establish DBS Corporation in Arlington, Virginia. Although the firm conducted defense research (including work on United States Navy ship maintenance optimization and weapons applications), it primarily specialized in "analyzing the socioeconomic effects of government affirmative action programs" as a contractor under the auspices of the Department of Justice and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. For a while, the company was partially supported by American Management Systems, a business consulting firm that drew upon algorithms Everett developed. He concurrently held a non-administrative vice presidency at AMS and was frequently consulted by the firm's founders.

Everett cultivated an early aptitude for computer programming at IDA and favored the TRS-80 at DBS, where he primarily worked for the rest of his life.

Later recognition In 1970, Bryce DeWitt wrote an article for Physics Today on Everett's relative-state theory, which he dubbed many-worlds, which prompted a number of letters from physicists. (The term "many-worlds" was coined by Bryce DeWitt, but David Deutsch, having met Everett for dinner in 1977, says that Everett was actually excited by the term and defended it.) "Relative state" was Wheeler's terminology—Everett's own original choice was "correlation interpretation". enjoyed the presentation; it was the first time in years he had talked about his quantum work in public. But he did little to promote his theory, saying, " had washed my hands of the whole affair in 1956".

Death and legacy At age 51, Everett died of a heart attack at home Of the companies Everett initiated, only Monowave Corporation still existed , in Seattle.

Everett's daughter, Elizabeth, died by suicide in 1996, and his wife died of cancer in 1998. Everett's son, the musician Mark Oliver Everett, also known as "E", is the main singer and songwriter for the band Eels. The Eels album Electro-Shock Blues, written during the late 1990s, was inspired by E's emotional response to these deaths.

Of Everett's death, Mark Everett later said: I think about how angry I was that my dad didn't take better care of himself. How he never went to a doctor, let himself become grossly overweight, smoked three packs a day, drank like a fish and never exercised. But then I think about how his colleague mentioned that, days before dying, my dad had said he lived a good life and that he was satisfied. I realize that there is a certain value in my father's way of life. He ate, smoked and drank as he pleased, and one day he just suddenly and quickly died. Given some of the other choices I'd witnessed, it turns out that enjoying yourself and then dying quickly is not such a hard way to go. In 2008, the program was edited and shown on the Public Broadcasting Service's Nova series in the U.S. In the program, Mark says he was unaware that his father was a brilliant and influential physicist until his death.