3 ms·
My mistake: I should have said can't. Schrödinger time evolution is linear and unitary, ie once you split off branches that have factors living in different eig
by cygx 7y ago
My mistake: I should have said can't. Schrödinger time evolution is linear and unitary, ie once you split off branches that have factors living in different eigenspaces, they can no longer interact.
It is true that branches may in principle join again - however, that cannot be detected by nature of the process.
- lisper 7y ago> once you split off branches that have factors living in different eigenspaces And how exactly does that happen? The answer is: it doesn't. The orthogonality of different branches is an approximation. It's a very good approximation because decoherence is a phenomenally efficient process, but it's an approximation nonetheless. The universal wave function always resides in the same Hilbert space because, as you yourself pointed out, Schrödinger time evolution is linear and unitary.