Consider a system of two 1/2-spins. Under some conditions the Hilbert space can be decomposed into the direct sum of spin-0 and spin-1 representations: $\frac12\otimes\frac12=0\oplus1$.
When I write this formula on the board, I immediately get an objection that $1/4$ is not equal to 1 ! My question is as follows, how to explain this equation to the audience of physicists. Preferably in one or two sentences, concise, mathematically correct, but without going into much mathematical details.
Each spin-1/2 particle is associated with a $(2\times\frac{1}{2}+1)$=2-dimensional vector space $\mathbb{V}$ as far as its spin degree of freedom is concerned. A composite system of two spin-1/2 particles is associated with a 4-dimensional vector space which is a direct product $\mathbb{V}_1\otimes \mathbb{V}_2$ of two 2-dimensional vector spaces $\mathbb{V}_1$ and $\mathbb{V}_2$. Under a similarity transformation a $4\times 4$ matrix representing an element of $SU(2)$ that acts on the space $\mathbb{V}_1\otimes \mathbb{V}_2$, can be reduced to a block-diagonal form consisting of block matrices of dimensions $3\times 3$ and $1\times 1$ acting on invariant subspaces of dimensions 3 and 1 respectively.
In technical terms, it means that the 4-dimensional representation is reducible into a 3-dimensional and 1-dimensional irreducible representations, and symbolically written as $2\otimes 2=3\oplus 1$ which respectively corresponds to three triplet states of spin-1 and one singlet state of spin-0 of the composite system.
