On the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics

by Hugh Everett

Paperback

Published January 1, 1963

Reviews

[Joseph Yue · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hugh Everett III finished his doctoral thesis first in 1956, but no one at the time was happy about how deranged it all sounds. His supervisor John Wheeler therefore asked him to keep it to the formalism, and the result is this barely intelligible piece of pure wave mechanics, submitted as the final version of his thesis in 1957. No amount of translation from mundane language to mathematical formalism, however, can render a crazy theory sane: when one sees through the maze of symbols encoded in linear algebra, the theory is still not reconciled to experience. Yet, according to Everett, it almost doesn't matter: 'The formalism invites one to construct the formal theory first, and to supply the statistical interpretation later' (p. 35). In this sense, this arcane seminal work which no one reads today is the source of the modern travesty of science that exalts theory over observation. From then on, with some 60 years of patchwork, Many-Worlds is almost reinvented anew, like a Frankenstein, alive but monstrous.