Image: Illustration by Sean McCabe
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 dismissed 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 Personally, he was emotionally withdrawn and a heavy drinker.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.
--The Editors
More In This Article
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.
This article was originally published with the title The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett.
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6 Comments
Add Commentgives you some fruit for thought and imagination doesnt it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswell I enjoy with this kind of way of thinking, I'm not a spiritual person but this seems to take us to a step beyond the individuality maybe string theory and all the other dimensions will "bring" the answers to this work
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree with Niels Bohr. Parallel Universes is a bunch of nonsense.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHEY!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe notion of a branching universe poses 2 problems. the first in conservation of energy. where did all the energy come from for these multiverses? second, why is our universe the node from which the others branch? Since any universe can make the claim as being the unique node, i would suggest that all parallel universes exist now and have existed. Each one 'realizes' the result of a given quantum experiment, so that taken together, all possible quantum results are realized in on of the parallel universes. I'd imagine the infinity of the multiverse is that of the real numbers, and not the integers, which allows for the sad fact that we have all sat through a showing of ice capades an infinite number of times.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisi have read so much and widely and still cannot make sense of these parallel universes rubbish
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