Our sense-experiences are “unitary” (in some sense which I hope we can agree on without defining rigorously), so of course we use unitary measure to predict them. Branching worlds are not unitary in that sense, so carrying over unitarity from the former to the latter seems an entirely arbitrary assumption.
A finite number (say, the number of particles in the known universe), raised to a finite number (say, the number of Planck time intervals before dark energy tears the universe apart), gives a finite number. No need for divergence. (I think both of those are severe overestimates for the actual possible branching, but they are reasonable as handwavy demonstrations of the existence of finite upper bounds)
Ah, by ‘unitary’ I mean a unitary operator, that is an operator which preserves the Hilbert measure. It’s an axiom of quantum mechanics that time evolution is represented by a unitary operator.
Fair point about the probable finitude of time(but wouldn’t it be better if our theory could handle the possibility of infinite time as well?)
Our sense-experiences are “unitary” (in some sense which I hope we can agree on without defining rigorously), so of course we use unitary measure to predict them. Branching worlds are not unitary in that sense, so carrying over unitarity from the former to the latter seems an entirely arbitrary assumption.
A finite number (say, the number of particles in the known universe), raised to a finite number (say, the number of Planck time intervals before dark energy tears the universe apart), gives a finite number. No need for divergence. (I think both of those are severe overestimates for the actual possible branching, but they are reasonable as handwavy demonstrations of the existence of finite upper bounds)
Ah, by ‘unitary’ I mean a unitary operator, that is an operator which preserves the Hilbert measure. It’s an axiom of quantum mechanics that time evolution is represented by a unitary operator.
Fair point about the probable finitude of time(but wouldn’t it be better if our theory could handle the possibility of infinite time as well?)