Hugh Everett III

It is a hack.

And this profound tension led physicist Hugh Everett to propose a radical solution back in 1957.

The

many worlds interpretation.

Uh, then it becomes a case of, well, even within that subset of realist interpretations, y- there's a whole host of different possibilities.

Uh, and these days, the three leading contenders are, uh, uh, Hugh Everett's many worlds interpretation, developed in the 1950s.

There's, uh, Louis de Broglie and David Bohm, what's called pilot-wave, uh, theory or Bohmian mechanics.

And then there's what's called spontaneous collapse.

Yes, the many worlds interpretation.

This was proposed by Hugh Everett.

They suggest that the wave function never collapses.

Instead, the universe literally splits into multiple parallel outcomes at every quantum measurement.

The universe plays dice.

But what if it doesn't? What if Einstein was right to want determinism, but wrong about the hidden gloves? What if the wave function never collapses? This leads to my favorite, most sci-fi interpretation, the many worlds interpretation proposed by a Princeton student named Hugh Everett in 1957.

Everett looked at the Schrodinger equation and asked a very simple question.

What if we just take the math completely literally? Everett argued that there is no magical collapse.

You just don't get it, do you Jean-Luc? The trial never ends.

In 1957, Princeton graduate student Hugh Everett proposed a radical alternative interpretation.

Put simply, the wave function never collapses.

Ever.

For any other trillion universes, everyone else would just watch you die, wondering why you would do such a thing.

They would not see this proof, and thus this experiment fails to convince the rest of the world.

Although Hugh Everett never wrote about this idea, Eugene Shiekostev's biography states, Everett firmly believed that his many worlds theory guaranteed him immortality.

His consciousness, he argued, is bound at each branching to follow whatever path that does not lead to death and so on ad infinitum.

May 31st, 1957.

Hugh Everett III, a 26-year-old physicist working after Princeton, writes a four-page letter from Arlington, Virginia to Bryce DeWitt.

DeWitt has attacked the central weakness in Everett's proposed quantum theory.

A measuring device gives one result.

Could you unpack the actual science here? The script mentions quantum mechanics, but how does Crouch actually use that to build a thriller?

He's leaning on the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics originally proposed by Hugh Everett.

OK.

The multiverse.

E was going through a lot of sort of trauma at the time.

So the background of this, E's father, Hugh Everett III... was a quantum mechanic.

So he's basically a particle physicist.

Yeah,