What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

by Adam Becker

new job at the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG) at the Pentagon

Everett finally received his PhD in physics from Princeton in April 1957.

published in Reviews of Modern Physics.

physicists in Copenhagen still didn’t agree with Wheeler.

Petersen and the others in Copenhagen thought that the process of observation had to be classical—

world must be split in two:

Everett also pointed out that applying the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to measurement devices, as Petersen had done in his reply—and as Bohr had done in his replies to Einstein thirty years earlier—violated the Copenhagen interpretation’s strict interdiction against using quantum physics to describe measurements.

Richard Feynman, who was at the conference (and who had once been a student of Wheeler’s himself), simply found Everett’s ideas too preposterous to accept.

Not everyone dismissed Everett’s new interpretation out of hand.

Norbert Weiner,

Henry Margenau, at Yale, a notable dissenter from the Copenhagen orthodoxy

calling wave function collapse “a mathematical fiction” and a “grotesque claim,”

he approved of Everett’s ideas, though he admitted that he had not had time to read the thesis carefully.

Bryce DeWitt,

skeptical of Everett’s thesis at first.

Thus, in order to decide whether or not a theory contradicts our experience, it is necessary to see what the theory itself predicts our experience will be.

I can’t resist asking: Do you feel the motion of the earth?

DeWitt,

for the time being,

Everett’s sole disciple.

Everett,

never returning to academia.

the reality is that Everett never wanted to be an academic.

Wheeler’s wishes for Everett’s career fell on deaf ears.

Everett cared about fine food, cocktails, cigarettes, travel—and women.

his work kept him in contact with the uppermost echelons of the nascent military-industrial complex.

gaming out different hypothetical scenarios of nuclear apocalypse.

Everett took a vacation to Europe—and Denmark was their first stop.

Misner’s recollection, there were no fireworks or showdowns between Bohr and Everett.

“Bohr’s view of quantum mechanics was essentially totally accepted throughout the world by thousands of physicists

doing it every day.

“That was a hell of a—doomed from the beginning.”