Text / Elmer Eisner letter to John Wheeler, 24-November-1957

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Title: Elmer Eisner letter to John Wheeler, 24-November-1957
Creator: Eisner, Elmer
Contributor: Wheeler, John A., annotator
Date Created and/or Issued: 1957-11-24
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: Elmer Eisner was a geophysicist working for Texaco in Houston, TX. Here he is responding to the published versions of Hugh Everett's short thesis and Wheeler's commentary. His idea seems to be that one cannot distinguish between intentional measurements made by some observer and other, "spontaneous" measurements. Although the formalism and language are not yet in place, this letter prefigures some later discussion on decoherence, insofar as Eisner is beginning to think about the role that spurious correlations with the environment can affect the evolution of the universal wave function. Unfortunately, we do not have John Wheeler's "off-hand" response to Eisner, nor do we know if Everett wrote anything as Wheeler requested.
Scope/Content: This document was found in the basement of Mark Everett in 2007 by Mark Everett and Peter Byrne.
Type: text
Identifier: ark:/81235/d81c1tv4g
http://hdl.handle.net/10575/1197
Language: English
eng
Subject: Wheeler, John A.
Everett, Hugh III
Eisner, Elmer
Correspondence
Relative states, branches, and worlds
Relation: Hugh Everett III Correspondence

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