Хью Эверет III: Кванттық механиканың көп әлемдік интерпретациясының авторы

American scientist (1930–1982)

Hugh Everett III ('/ɛ//v//ər//ɪ//t/; November 11, 1930 – July 19, 1982) was an American physicist who, in his 1957 PhD thesis, proposed what is now known as the many worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics. 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. Afterward, he developed the use of generalized Lagrange multipliers for operations research and applied this commercially as a defense analyst and a consultant. He died at the age of 51 in 1982. He is the father of musician Mark Oliver Everett. Although largely disregarded until near the end of Everett's lifetime, the MWI received more credibility with the discovery of quantum decoherence in the 1970s and has received increased attention in recent decades, becoming one of the mainstream interpretations of quantum mechanics alongside Copenhagen, pilot wave theories, and consistent histories.

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:

Blockquote|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. In June 1956 Everett started defense work in the Pentagon's Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG). 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, 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.

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. efn|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, he said "[I] had washed my hands of the whole affair in 1956".

At age 51, Everett died suddenly of a heart attack at home Of Everett's death, his son, Mark Oliver Everett, later said: blockquote|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. It is managed by co founder Elaine Tsiang, who received a PhD in physics under Bryce DeWitt at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before working for DBS as a programmer. Everett's daughter, Elizabeth, died by suicide in 1996, and his wife died of cancer in 1998. Everett's son, Mark Oliver Everett, is also known as "E" and 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. Mark Everett explored his father's work in the hour long BBC television documentary Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives. The program was edited and shown on the Public Broadcasting Service's Nova series in the USA in 2008. In the program, Mark says he was unaware of his father's status as a brilliant and influential physicist until his death.

The original and most comprehensive paper on many worlds. Investigates and recasts the foundations of quantum theory in information theoretic terms, before moving on to consider the nature of interactions, observation, entropy, irreversible processes, classical objects etc. A study of the painful three way relationship between Hugh Everett, John A Wheeler and Niels Bohr and how this affected the early development of the many worlds theory.