7 ms·

I suspect it's an approximation of much lower level deterministic processes that we don't understand yet. One serious issue is renormalization, a crude mathema

• tines 4y ago
  Pretty sure it's been proven that no deterministic theory can reproduce all the predictions of quantum mechanics. That's the essence of Bell's theorem isn't it?
  • drunkpotato 4y ago
    The two explanations or interpretations I’ve come across that recover determinism are many worlds interpretation and superdeterminism. I don’t think either are testable with current technology so it’s not a very satisfying or experimentally useful explanation. At least not yet.
  • kloch 4y ago
    From wikipedia: > Consequently, the only way that hidden variables could explain the predictions of quantum physics is if they are "nonlocal", which is to say that somehow the two particles were able to interact instantaneously no matter how widely the two particles are separated. It's true that with our current theories, instantaneous action at a distance does not seem possible. Yet quantum experiments (wave function collapse over large distances) consistently suggest this might be possible at macro (non-quantum) scales. I think our knowledge is incomplete on this topic. Gravity is another area where I don't think non-local effects have been fully ruled out. Gravitational waves (energy emitted/thrown off by certain mass/momentum configurations) have been proven to travel at or near the speed of light, but the propagation speed of the first order gravitational effects an open question. This is an area I would love to see more experimentation done. To simultaneously measure the gravitational and optical positions of the Moon or Sun for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity
    • hprotagonist 4y ago
      if you have instantaneous action, you no longer have causality. squaring that circle seems, uh, fraught.
      • feet 4y ago
        Unless they're acting on each other through another euclidian dimension that we can't currently perceive in our three dimensional perspective
        • thfuran 4y ago
          How could there be a higher dimensional, shorter path between the points?
          • akomtu 4y ago
            Wolfram speculated on this idea: if spacetime is a graph, it may approximate the 3+1 topology on average, but in some places two distant nodes can be connected by a direct link. I'd speculate further that such isolated links may be enough to entangle low-level quantum properties of two particles, but not enough to be a tunnel even for a single photon.
            • thfuran 4y ago
              That would not be a euclidean space.
              • akomtu 4y ago
                Who said our universe is euclidean? We just make this assumption for convenience.
                • thfuran 4y ago
                  The comment I replied to initially.
  • immmmmm 4y ago
    Gerard 't Hooft would disagree https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0212095 https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0212095
  • effie 4y ago
    No. Bell's theorem states that local hidden variable theory obeys Bell's inequalities. Quantum theory models and some experiments with light violate those inequalities. At best, we can conclude that any deterministic theory supplanting quantum theory can't be Bell-local, or that it violates some other assumption of Bell's theorem (e.g. independence of actions at two separated experimental sites).
• auntienomen 4y ago
  Renormalization hasn't been a conceptual problem since Ken Wilson's work in the 1970s. Before that, it looked like a mathematical hack (rather like linear algebra without the geometric interpretation) and a lot of physicists who came of age in the postwar period never got over this.
• bowsamic 4y ago
  > I suspect it's an approximation of much lower level deterministic processes that we don't understand yet. All current evidence heavily leans towards this not being the case
  • zmgsabst 4y ago
    What evidence do you believe shows that?
    • bowsamic 4y ago
      Basically that non-local hidden variables and superdeterminism do not seem like likely solutions to the violation of Bell's inequalities compared to just accepting that nature is random. You have to do a fair amount of reaching in order to hang onto the notion that the universe is deterministic
      • zmgsabst 4y ago
        Except that we know entanglement is non-local: this suggests that non-locality rather than non-determinism is the correct resolution to Bell’s inequalities. Non-determinism is an extraneous assumption if we’re forced to accept non-locality for other reasons. Edit: I’ve hit my posting cap, so replying in edit — If we know particles are entangled and subject to non-local effects, we’re already concluding that there’s a hidden non-local variable: the sum of all entanglements we don’t know about. You can model that as a randomness distribution for calculations, but that doesn’t make the universe non-deterministic. Edit 2: I think where we diverge is in the belief you’re measuring “nothing” and so it’s strange you’re getting slightly varying results. I’ll have to think about that aspect some more. I’ll leave off here with a big thanks for giving such detailed replies!
        • bowsamic 4y ago
          Except non-local deterministic theories are much more complicated and almost impossible to use. That's why a lot of physicists regard the result as showing that reality is both non-local and non-deterministic. Very few suspect a non-local hidden variables theory. I think that non-determinism would be an extraneous assumption given the fundamental randomness apparent in quantum measurements. In my opinion, hidden variables are something extra to add to take account of this, and indeed it's very difficult to use Bohmian mechanics with relativity etc.