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1. Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2024 19:08:51 UTC Robert McNees

   But there are a few things I want to mention. Though it's not what he is primarily known for, DeWitt was an advocate of Everett's "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. He did lots to popularize it among physicists.

   Max Jammer was writing a book on the interpretations and history of QM, and told DeWitt he'd never heard of Everett. So DeWitt took it on himself to raise the profile of Everett's work.

   In 1970 he wrote this popular article in Physics Today:
   https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/23/9/30/427387/Quantum-mechanics-and-realityCould-the-solution-to

   • Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2024 19:10:12 UTC Robert McNees

     in reply to

     Bryce DeWitt also gave me the best piece of advice I ever got in graduate school.

     I was working on a paper with another grad student, and we were stuck on a technical detail of a calculation. It was something we were sure Bryce had worked on at some point, but it wasn't written down in any books or papers we could find.

   • Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2024 19:12:10 UTC Robert McNees

     in reply to

     So we went to Bryce and explained our problem. We had to argue with him for a while, to convince him that the question we were asking could possibly be relevant for anything. It took a very, very long time.

     Finally, he growled "You know what your problem is? Too much book learning."

     (Bryce sounded just like Charlton Heston. He could sound kind of intimidating.)

   • Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jan-2024 19:14:39 UTC Robert McNees

     in reply to

     He went on to explain that the answer to our question *might* be in a book or paper somewhere, but we'd learn a lot more if we figured it out ourselves.

     He was right!

     At that point, maybe my second year of grad school, I thought answers were found in papers and books. Bryce challenged me to come up with my own answer, which I did.

     It was hard, but the calculation worked, and I published my first paper.

     Thanks, Bryce.