| H. Dieter Zeh | |
| Birth Date: | 8 May 1932 |
| Birth Place: | Braunschweig, Free State of Brunswick |
| Death Place: | Freudenstadt, Baden-Württemberg |
| Nationality: | German |
| Fields: | Theoretical physics |
| Workplaces: | University of Heidelberg |
| Education: | Technical University of Braunschweig University of Heidelberg |
| Thesis Title: | Untersuchungen zur Theorie des \alpha |
| Thesis1 Url: | and |
| Thesis2 Url: | )--> |
| Thesis Year: | 1961 |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Hans-Jörg Mang |
| Known For: | Many-minds interpretation Quantum decoherence |
Heinz-Dieter Zeh (pronounced as /de/; 8 May 1932 – 15 April 2018), usually referred to as H. Dieter Zeh, was a professor (later professor emeritus) of the University of Heidelberg and theoretical physicist.
Zeh was born in Braunschweig and studied physics at the Technical University of Braunschweig and nuclear physics at the University of Heidelberg under J. Hans D. Jensen. At Heidelberg, he also investigated alpha particle formation in nuclei with Hans-Jörg Mang and Zeh investigated the topic for his PhD thesis under Mang. Between 1964 and 1965, Zeh was a research assistant at California Institute of Technology and in 1965 and between 1967 and 1968 at the University of California, San Diego. He later became a professor in Heidelberg.[1] [2]
Zeh's research revolves around the fundamental problems of quantum mechanics since the 1960s, in particular with Hugh Everett III's many-worlds interpretation. Zeh was one of the developers of the many-minds interpretation of quantum mechanics[3] and the discoverer of decoherence, first described in his seminal 1970 paper.[4]