2018/02/27 by D. Weingarten, Weingarten, Don
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #History and Philosophy of Physics (physics.hist-ph) #Quantum Computing Algorithms and Architecture #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1802.10136
openalex publication_date 2018/02/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Beginning with the Everett-DeWitt many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there have been a series of proposals for how the state vector of a quantum system might be split at any instant into orthogonal branches, each of which exhibits approximately classical behavior. Here we propose a decomposition of a state vector into branches by finding the minimum of a measure of the net quantum complexity of the branch decomposition. We then propose a method for finding an ensemble of possible initial state vectors from which a randomly selected member, if evolved by ordinary Hamiltonian time evolution, will follow a single sequence of those branches of many-worlds quantum mechanics which persist through time. Macroscopic reality, we hypothesize, consists of an accumulating sequence of such persistent branching results. For any particular draw, the resulting deterministic system appears to exhibit random behavior as a result of the successive emergence over time of information present in the initial state but not previously observed.