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Hugh Everett draft letter with calculations to Norbert Wiener, May-1957

Hugh Everett

Published May 19, 2011• 0 citations
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Abstract

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.

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Hugh Everett handwritten draft letter to E.T. Jaynes, 15-May-1957

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•May 19, 2011•0 citations
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.
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.
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.
Henry Margenau was a German physicist and philosopher of physics who had previously written on the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. It seems that Hugh Everett---or rather, John Wheeler---sent Everett's thesis to Margenau and other physicists for comments. Margenau was the first to reply, and though he admits to not having looked at the work closely, he appears to approve. Margenau includes a preprint of a paper of his own to be published in the journal Philosophy of Science, and a reprint of an earlier paper from Physical Review.
One of the most successful physicists of the generation immediately before Hugh Everett III, E. T. Jaynes shared both Everett's interest in applications of information theory to physics and his foundational orientation. But whereas Everett focused on quantum mechanics, much of Jaynes' work concerned how to use information theory in thermodynamics. Here Everett sketches an initial reaction to a published paper of Jaynes', "Information Theory and Statistical Mechanics," Physical Review, 106, 620-630 (1957). The date on the document corresponds to the date that Jaynes' article appeared in print, and not necessarily to the date on which the notes were written.