Abstract
I argue that Hilbert space, one of the foundational elements of quantum physics, is unphysical in the context of quantum many-body systems. Physical states reside in a tiny corner of Hilbert and are not best thought of as exponentially long vectors. The important question is how to characterize the space of physical states, and I suggest that it may be useful to take a quantum computer's view of the world. Finally, I apply this reasoning in a specific case to obtain a description of the universal aspects of quantum ground states in terms of an emergent entanglement geometry.
Brian Swingle