Hugh Everett III
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.031090
On this date in 1930, Hugh Everett III was born in Washington, D.C. While completing his PhD in physics at Princeton, Everett wrote a paper titled “The Theory of the Universal Wave Function” that proposed a “relative-state” interpretation of quantum mechanics. The theory argued that the entire universe is described by a single wave function, an idea that was so divergent from Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics that it was not well-received by many physicists at the time. An article in Physics Today in 1970 by Bryce DeWitt (http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3022331) helped revitalize interest in Everett’s idea, which is now more commonly known as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Date in History: 11 November 1930
