Hugh Everett
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In Brief
- Fifty years ago Hugh Everett devised the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which quantum effects spawn countless branches of the universe with different events occurring in each.
- The theory sounds like a bizarre hypothesis, but in fact Everett inferred it from the fundamental mathematics of quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, most physicists of the time dimissed it, and he had to abridge his Ph.D. thesis on the topic to make it seem less controversial.
- Discouraged, Everett left physics and worked on military and industrial mathematics and computing. Personally, he was emotionally withdrawn and a heavy drinker.
- He died when he was just 51, not living to see the recent respect accorded his ideas by physicists.
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Hugh Everett: New film tackles
Editor's Note: This story was originally printed in the December 2007 issue of Scientific American and is being reposted from our archive in light of a new documentary on PBS, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives.
Hugh Everett III was a brilliant mathematician, an iconoclastic quantum theorist and, later, a successful defense contractor with access to the nation’s most sensitive military secrets. He introduced a new conception of reality to physics and influenced the course of world history at a time when nuclear Armageddon loomed large. To science-fiction aficionados, he remains a folk hero: the man who invented a quantum theory of multiple universes. To his children, he was someone else again: an emotionally unavailable father; “a lump of furniture sitting at the dining room table,” cigarette in hand. He was also a chain-smoking alcoholic who died prematurely.
At least that is how his history played out in our fork of the universe. If the many-worlds theory that Everett developed when he was a student at Princeton University in the mid-1950s is correct, his life took many other turns in an unfathomable number of branching universes.
Everett’s revolutionary analysis broke apart a theoretical logjam in interpreting the how of quantum mechanics. Although the many-worlds idea is by no means universally accepted even today, his methods in devising the theory presaged the concept of quantum decoherence— a modern explanation of why the probabilistic weirdness of quantum mechanics resolves itself into the concrete world of our experience.
Everett’s work is well known in physics and philosophical circles, but the tale of its discovery and of the rest of his life is known by relatively few. Archival research by Russian historian Eugene Shikhovtsev, myself and others and interviews I conducted with the late scientist’s colleagues and friends, as well as with his rock-musician son, unveil the story of a radiant intelligence extinguished all too soon by personal demons.
Ridiculous Things
Everett’s scientific journey began one night in 1954, he recounted two decades later, “after a slosh or two of sherry.” He and his Princeton classmate Charles Misner and a visitor named Aage Petersen (then an assistant to Niels Bohr) were thinking up “ridiculous things about the implications of quantum mechanics.” During this session Everett had the basic idea behind the many-worlds theory, and in the weeks that followed he began developing it into a dissertation.
The core of the idea was to interpret what the equations of quantum mechanics represent in the real world by having the mathematics of the theory itself show the way instead of by appending interpretational hypotheses to the math. In this way, the young man challenged the physics establishment of the day to reconsider its foundational notion of what constitutes physical reality.
In pursuing this endeavor, Everett boldly tackled the notorious measurement problem in quantum mechanics, which had bedeviled physicists since the 1920s. In a nutshell, the problem arises from a contradiction between how elementary particles (such as electrons and photons) interact at the microscopic, quantum level of reality and what happens when the particles are measured from the macroscopic, classical level. In the quantum world, an elementary particle, or a collection of such particles, can exist in a superposition of two or more possible states of being. An electron, for example, can be in a superposition of different locations, velocities and orientations of its spin. Yet anytime scientists measure one of these properties with precision, they see a definite result—just one of the elements of the superposition, not a combination of them. Nor do we ever see macroscopic objects in superpositions. The measurement problem boils down to this question: How and why does the unique world of our experience emerge from the multiplicities of alternatives available in the superposed quantum world?
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14 Comments
Add Commentimaginative scientists- using imaginary numbers- creating imaginary universes-which cannot be fully imagined.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIMAGINE THAT ! ! TAHT ENIGMA!
If time were thought to actually oscillate, like a point on the rim of a rolling wheel that appears to go retrograde as it moves forward, much of the paradox of quantum multi-states would disappear.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFurthermore, the retrograde overlap would create the appearance that time had quantum properties (both partical and wave, simultaneously) as it marches forward to eternity.
photons traveling to a target could react in similarities as a basball being thrown (curved) when isosolation occures. Thus acting as a wave.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswow. i'm a huge Eels fan... that was a big suprise at the end of the article. Souljacker is a great album, i highly recommend it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDifferent worlds seem far fetched. but when we dial in a radio station in amongst static (I think of atoms as static) we are opened up to different worlds, so to speak. We electronically tap into a energy source from which we know how is produced. But perhaps we can tap (physiologically) into an energy source from another plain from which Everret theorizes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWow. I just finished reading the article. It's mind blowing. I've been a science fiction fan for over 40 years. Robert Heinlein's premise in "The Number of the Beast" that number of the beast is not 666, but 6 to th 6 th power raised to the sixth power is the possible number of universes, and that every time an author creates a new "universe" it becomes reality somewhere fits right in with Everett's theory.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt also illustrates the importance of being able to think in magnitudes of scale in both size and time. When I took my geography capstone course in 1993 or 1994, the geography chairman said that the last big paradigm shift in the discipline of geography was the realization of the importance of scale. This is true across many different disciplines. I've been obsessed with analyzing the flooding of Greater New Orleans from the Katrina storm surges, and the ACOE STILL doesn't understand that by treating the drainage and flood prevention systems as links in a chain that they are ignoring an awful lot, because they don't seem to have the ability to analyze the system from the microscopic level to the macroscopic level at different scales, from a single floodgate or canal, to the entire drainage system of the east bank, then all of south eastern LA to the entire state to the continent. Then there's the system of faults between the North American plate and Caribbean plate. When it it lets go in the right place, GNO is going to be inundated by a tsunami. Is that real enough possibility for those living in GNO to seriously consider moving their personal property to higher ground permanently? It is for me in this reality.
Not many years ago the world of science refused to believe measurements proving the world was round relying strictly on what felt "right" and what our physical perceptions led us to believe. Everett refused to be deceived by his senses and instead relied on and developed a theory true to mathematics and measurements. In the not so distant future his theory will prove him to be of the magnitude of Galileo. Godspeed Mr. Everett!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI wonder if Hugh's son has some old science-fiction mags from before his dad started to work on this that had some of the H.Beam Piper ParaTime stories in them. If he does, then Piper may be due a footnote or a byline in the history of this concept. Piper started publishing ParaTime stories in 1947 thru 1964. Check his "Lord Kalvan Of Otherwhen". It has multi divergent world lines based on the transposition of one individual into a world line where the choices he made once he arrived cause the generation of MANY NEW world lines. Here the quanta is choice in/of a human mind and how those humans around him react to bifurcate reality.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI hope that Hugh's daughter found him. ... "there are more things..."
I was inspired to review this material after reading "A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity" (Scientific American, March 2009). Specifically, I was impressed by the following, a description of Bohr's response to concerns about quantum mechanical entanglement: "Bohr's was a curiously philosophical response to an explicitly scientific concern. More curious still was the enshrinement of Bohr's response as the official gospel of theoretical physics. " I was unaware prior to reading this, and very glad to learn that "From the early 1980's onward, the grip of Bohr's conviction-that there could be no old-fashioned, philosophically realistic account of the subatomic world-was everywhere palpably beginning to weaken." As a former biomedical researcher, I despise bad science and the personality cults which allow it to prosper. Shame on Bohr, who led mainstream physics to turn "away from its old aspirations to uncover what the world is really like..." in favor of " 'a radical revision of our attitude as regards physical reality' " (Bohr's words). The worst thing about bad science is that it has the effect of suppressing the truth. My instincts always told me that collapsing wave functions were a bunch of hooey, and they also tell me that the truth lies in multiple universes. I suspect that Bohr's reputation will suffer, among the knowledgeable, in the same way as Freud's, and Everett's will rise after his death as did Gregor Mendel's.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLater on this year I will introduce a concept based on the principles of the fractal nature of our universe that will be a possible solution to all the theories that have left so many questions in this field. Even though I am but a retired janitor I have come up with a fractal way that I believe will give some way to answer how our world is constructed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso supressed and/or ignored were the 'pilot wave' concepts of David Bohm and Cramer's later but related 'Transactional Interpretation' of Quantum Theory...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCommenters 'westnova' and 'oklatonola' both raise important points on fractals and scale which both bear on the mind-twisting 'decidability' (sic) problem of Q-mechanics.
I think it's important to keep reminding ourselves how very subjective and limited our viewpoints are... in terms of time, scale and bandwidth!
Everett's theory does not seem that much far fetched to me. If time travel is possible, teleportation in being worked on and invisibility is a reality, then why not this?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow exciting it must be that everytime a measurement is made, the universe splits into new universes consisting of all possibilities allowed by that measurement. Billions of measurements each day. We must allow for levels of infinity beyond those contemplated by set theorists. I love science fiction too, but unfortunately Everett's mechanism of bifurcation is as unsatisfying as Bohr's collapes of the wavefunction, i.e. there is no mechanism posited (read Everett's original paper), rather it just happens. Bell's Inequality is still violated with no plausible explanation of why. Just that it is.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMany worlds is a bizarre hypothesis. The idea that a quantum event can spawn countless universes is an exercise in vanity. The truth is that limitations of the human brain create that perception. Having said that, it is likely that there are many universes and the brain switches between them seamlessly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisD J Wray
http://www.atotalawareness.com