Don Page | Preferred Operators Instead of Preferred Basis States

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Abstract: Everett showed that one need not have wavefunction collapse in quantum theory. Instead, one can have a single quantum state (in the Heisenberg picture) that never changes. However, if one decomposes the state into basis states, there will generically be nonzero amplitudes for many different basis states, sometimes called `Everett many worlds.' Many have sought to answer the challenge of finding a preferred set of basis states in order to give a preferred set of `Everett worlds.' I argue that this search for preferred basis states is misguided, and what we need instead is a set of preferred positive operators. These would be the operators whose expectation values I propose would give the relative measures for observations.

About the speaker: Don Page is a Professor of Physics at the University of Alberta. He has worked on quantum theory, cosmology, and black hole physics, and collaborated with Stephen Hawking on the thermodynamics of black holes, among other topics. He has also helped create the renowned Page-Wootters model, a model in which time is not a fundamental concept but emerges from the entanglement between quantum systems.