Many-worlds interpretation
Interpretación de los muchos mundos
- Date
- 1956-1957 · confidence high
- Place
- Princeton University, New Jersey, United States
- Credited to
- Hugh Everett III
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
In his doctoral thesis supervised by John Wheeler, Everett proposed that the quantum wave function never collapses: at every measurement, all possible outcomes happen, each in a different branch of the universe. The idea, published in 1957 and later named "many-worlds" by Bryce DeWitt, went almost unnoticed for over a decade.
The interpretation remains a minority view debated among physicists; Everett left theoretical physics shortly afterward, disappointed by the cool reception of his thesis.
What it led to
- Philosophical debate on the interpretation of quantum mechanics
- Quantum decoherence
Built on
- Copenhagen formulation of quantum mechanics