  The question of how irreversibility can emerge as a generic phenomena when
the underlying mechanical theory is reversible has been a long-standing
fundamental problem for both classical and quantum mechanics. We describe a
mechanism for the appearance of irreversibility that applies to coherent,
isolated systems in a pure quantum state. This equilibration mechanism requires
only an assumption of sufficiently complex internal dynamics and natural
information-theoretic constraints arising from the infeasibility of collecting
an astronomical amount of measurement data. Remarkably, we are able to prove
that irreversibility can be understood as typical without assuming decoherence
or restricting to coarse-grained observables, and hence occurs under distinct
conditions and time-scales than those implied by the usual decoherence point of
view. We illustrate the effect numerically in several model systems and prove
that the effect is typical under the standard random-matrix conjecture for
complex quantum systems.
