Description:
In spring of 1956, John Wheeler was in residence at the Lorentz Institute in Leiden, Netherlands. Before he left, he was confident that Hugh Everett would finish his thesis and graduate before Fall, 1956. By April, however, Everett has begun to question this assessment — even though he already plans to go to work for the Pentagon in June, 1956. Here, Donald Hamilton, another Princeton physicist, writes to Wheeler to ask if Wheeler agrees that Everett may need to continue in the fall. It is interesting to note that this letter was sent on April 24, 1956, the same day that Wheeler wrote to Bohr notifying him that he planned to come to Copenhagen, and that he was about to send a copy of Everett's thesis to Petersen. This means that Everett believed he would need additional time on his thesis before anyone in Copenhagen had even read his thesis. There is a suggestion that Everett wanted to remain a graduate student in order to maintain his draft exemption, independent of Bohr's reaction to his thesis. But Everett had already decided to take a job at the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, which exempted him for military duty.
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