Everettian relative states in the Heisenberg picture

Abstract

Everett's relative-state construction in quantum theory has never been satisfactorily expressed in the Heisenberg picture. What one might have expected to be a straightforward process was impeded by conceptual and technical problems that we solve here. The result is a construction which, unlike Everett's one in the Schrödinger picture, makes manifest the locality of Everettian multiplicity, and its inherently approximative nature, and its origin in certain kinds of entanglement and locally inaccessible information. Our construction also allows us to give a more precise definition of an Everett 'universe', under which it is fully quantum, not quasi-classical, and we compare the Everettian decomposition of a quantum state with the foliation of a spacetime.

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• The quantum theory of time: a calculus for q-numbers
• Quantum theories with local information flow
• Explaining Bell Locally
• Relative descriptors for quantum agents