The Many Worlds Of Hugh Everett, III

A biographical sketch of Hugh Everett, III, is available on the home page of Max Tegmark. It seems the most complete Everett reference available on the Web, with sources and details of Everett’s life and scientific work.
Sources used for this biographical sketch include papers of Hugh Everett, III stored in the Niels Bohr Library of the American Institute of Physics; Graduate Alumni Files in Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University; personal correspondence of the author; and information found on the Internet.


The text is a work in progress, a compilation of materials that the author is collecting for writing a full-length biography of Everett. The material may be freely used for personal or educational purposes provided acknowledgement is given to Eugene B. Shikhovtsev, author (eshi@kmtn.ru), and Kenneth W. Ford, editor (kwford@verizon.net).


From the Everett FAQ (another “historic” Everett reference): Hugh Everett, III was the originator of the Everett, relative-state, many-histories or many-universes interpretation or metatheory of quantum theory. He did his undergraduate study in chemical engineering at the Catholic University of America. Studying von Neumann’s and Bohm’s textbooks as part of his graduate studies, under Wheeler, in mathematical physics at Princeton University in the 1950s, he became dissatisfied (like many others before and since) with the collapse of the wavefunction. He developed, during discussions with Charles Misner and Aage Peterson (Bohr’s assistant, then visiting Princeton), his “relative state” formulation. Wheeler encouraged his work, and preprints were circulated in January 1956 to a number of physicists. A condensed version of his thesis was published as a paper to The Role of Gravity in Physics conference held at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in January 1957.