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Hugh Everett letter to Philip Frank, 31-May-1957

Hugh Everett

Published May 19, 2011• 0 citations
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Abstract

In his Reviews of Modern Physics article on Hugh Everett's theory, John Wheeler referenced the philosophical writings of Philip Frank, a philosopher of science at Harvard University. In May 1957, Everett sent Frank the Reviews of Modern Physics preprints, along with a letter in which he identified himself with Frank's broadly empiricist world view. Frank had also written about the historical difficulty of gaining acceptance of new scientific theories, such as the sun-centered solar system proposed by Copernicus. It is probably not a coincidence that Everett referred to Copernicus in his May 31, 1957 correspondence with DeWitt. Writing to Frank on the same day, he referenced the treatment of Copernicus by the 16th century religious and scientific establishment as a way of explaining the rejection of his relative state formulation by Bohr and his followers.

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Hugh Everett letter to Bryce S. DeWitt, 31-May-1957

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•May 19, 2011•0 citations
In his Reviews of Modern Physics article on Hugh Everett's theory, John Wheeler referenced the philosophical writings of Philip Frank, a philosopher of science at Harvard University. In May 1957, Everett sent Frank the Reviews of Modern Physics preprints, along with a letter in which he identified himself with Frank's broadly empiricist world view. Frank had also written about the historical difficulty of gaining acceptance of new scientific theories, such as the sun-centered solar system proposed by Copernicus. It is probably not a coincidence that Everett referred to Copernicus in his May 31, 1957 correspondence with DeWitt. Writing to Frank on the same day, he referenced the treatment of Copernicus by the 16th century religious and scientific establishment as a way of explaining the rejection of his relative state formulation by Bohr and his followers.
In spring of 1956, John Wheeler was in residence at the Lorentz Institute in Leiden, Netherlands. In April, 1956 a copy of the long version of Hugh Everett's thesis was sent to the Institute; the next month, Wheeler traveled to Copenhagen to discuss the thesis with Bohr and others. This is a letter he wrote to Everett after he returned to Leiden, following up on his letter from the day before (in which he forwarded Alexander Stern's criticisms to Everett). Here he includes his notes from a conversation with Niels Bohr — dated 4 May 1956 — on Everett's thesis, and urges Everett to come to Copenhagen immediately to discuss his work with Bohr. He includes an offer to pay for Everett's travel from his own research funds. Although Everett would ultimately travel to Copenhagen in 1959, he did not accept the invitation Wheeler extends here.
MIT mathematician, physicist, and polymath Norbert Wiener was among the physicists who received preprints of Hugh Everett and John Wheeler's Review of Modern Physics articles. Wiener at this time was developing his own alternative mathematical/interpretive framework for quantum mechanics, and here he projects some of his own views on Everett while offering criticism of Everett's particular approach. Everett, meanwhile, disavows in his marginal comments several of the ideas that Wiener attributes to him.
As a close friend and collaborator of Wheeler's, DeWitt was one of the first people to see a draft of the short version of Everett's thesis (he did not read the longer version until much later, as is evidenced by some of the complaints in this letter). In May 1957, DeWitt wrote a long and thoughtful letter to Wheeler about how Everett's theory had conceptual parallels with Einstein's theory of general relativity. At the end of that month, Everett sent his reply. This document is a copy of the letter that Everett sent. In response to DeWitt's insistence that he has direct introspective evidence that he does not split, Everett draws an analogy with anti-Copernicans, who argued that they had direct evidence that the world did not move. Based on much later remarks, it seems that DeWitt was convinced by Everett's rejoinder.
MIT mathematician, physicist, and polymath Norbert Wiener was among the physicists who received preprints of Hugh Everett and John Wheeler's Review of Modern Physics articles. Wiener at this time was developing his own alternative mathematical/interpretive framework for quantum mechanics. This document is a draft of the letter Everett would ultimately send. Here he sketches his response to Wiener's comments on his preprint, emphasizing that he disagrees that his formulation of quantum mechanics requires a notion of Lebesgue measure on a Hilbert space.
Hugh Everett's thesis was ultimately published in September 1957 in a special issue of Reviews of Modern Physics, guest edited by Bryce DeWitt. This was Everett first and only journal publication on the topic. In July of that year, however, as the journal article was going to press, Wheeler spoke with mathematician and physicist Norbert Wiener about Everett's theory. Wiener argued about the importance of a measure in Everett's work. Everett, too, saw his derivation of a typicality measure as of central important, especially in the long thesis. But there is no evidence that Everett followed Wheeler's advice of writing a follow-up paper addressing the question of a measure on the space of branches more explicitly. Wheeler also, once again, encourages Everett to visit Bohr.