Abstract
Often it is assumed that a quantum state or a phase-space distribution must be normalizable. Here it is shown that even if it is not normalizable, one may be able to extract normalized observational probabilities from it.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful for discussions with many colleagues, including Andreas Albrecht, Thomas Banks, Raphael Bousso, Sean Carroll, Brandon Carter, Benjamin Freivogel, Gary Gibbons, Alan Guth, James Hartle, Thomas Hertog, John Leslie, Andrei Linde, Donald Marolf, Roger Penrose, Martin Rees, Leonard Susskind, Neil Turok, William Unruh, Vitaly Vanchurin, Alexander Vilenkin, Robert Wald, and Edward Witten. I also appreciated the hospitality in India of Salaam Balaak Trust in Delhi, World Vision in Alwar, Metropolitan Mission in Vijayawada, Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, and hotels in Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Alwar, Vijayawada, and Varanasi, where some of these ideas arose during times of touring India and visiting various nonChristian and Christian humanitarian relief efforts there. This work was supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada.
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Alberta-Thy-5-12, arXiv:yymm.nnnn [hep-th].
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Page, D.N. Normalized Observational Probabilities from Unnormalizable Quantum States or Phase-Space Distributions. Found Phys 48, 827–836 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-018-0185-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-018-0185-9