Everett, Hugh

Hugh Everett III (; November 11, 1930 – July 19, 1982) was an American physicist who, in his 1957 PhD thesis, proposed relative state interpretation of quantum mechanics. This influential approach later became the basis of the many-worlds interpretation (MWI). Everett's theory dropped the wave function collapse postulate of quantum measurement theory, incorporating the observer in the same quantum state as the observation result. The quantum statistic becomes a measure of the branching of the universal wave function. After his PhD, Everett helped found small companies specializing in contracts with the US government. Although largely disregarded until near the end of his lifetime, Everett's work received more credibility with the discovery of quantum decoherence in the 1970s and has received increased attention in recent decades, with MWI becoming one of the important interpretations of quantum mechanics.