Text / Donald Hamilton letter to John Wheeler, 24-April-1956

Click here to view text. May contain additional pages.

Get Citation

Have a question about this item?

Contact Owner

Item information.

Title: Donald Hamilton letter to John Wheeler, 24-April-1956
Creator: Hamilton, Donald
Date Created and/or Issued: 1956-04-24
Contributing Institution: UC Irvine, Libraries, Special Collections
Collection: Hugh Everett III Manuscripts
Rights Information: Copyrighted
This material is provided for private study, scholarship, or research. Transmission or reproduction of any material protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. The authors or their heirs retain their copyrights to the material. Unless otherwise indicated, the original files were donated to the American Institute of Physics (https://history.aip.org/ead/20130435.html). For permission to publish, contact Jeffrey A. Barrett, representative for the Everett estate, j.barrett@uci.edu.
Description: Scope/Content: 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.
Scope/Content: This document is a reproduction of a document found in the John A. Wheeler papers at the American Philosophical Society.
Type: text
Identifier: ark:/81235/d8m03zb0q
http://hdl.handle.net/10575/1175
Language: English
eng
Subject: Everett, Hugh III
Wheeler, John A.
Correspondence
Relation: Hugh Everett III Correspondence

About the collections in Calisphere

Learn more about the collections in Calisphere. View our statement on digital primary resources.

Copyright, permissions, and use

If you're wondering about permissions and what you can do with this item, a good starting point is the "rights information" on this page. See our terms of use for more tips.

Share your story

Has Calisphere helped you advance your research, complete a project, or find something meaningful? We'd love to hear about it; please send us a message.