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Not sure I agree fully in the case of Uncertainty. To the best of our knowledge, an undetermined quantum property is actually undefined. Whether we go with the
by digging 3y ago
Not sure I agree fully in the case of Uncertainty. To the best of our knowledge, an undetermined quantum property is actually undefined. Whether we go with the simple Many Worlds or the Copenhagen wave function collapse or even Pilot Wave theory, when the value becomes defined it is randomly selected (or our World is a random selection of all of them) according to the wave function.
I believe what you're saying is that there is indeed a superdeterministic hidden variable that would allow us to know before the value is defined what it will be. For simplicity let's assume the Many Worlds interpretation... this variable would tell us which world we're in.
The issue with this explanation is that we're not in that World yet, because our current World is only the result of past quantum events. When this next undefined value becomes defined, our single world splits into Many more Worlds, each of which has ours as a parent, so how could one of those be more or less intrinsically ours? Each is equally our World, and if we back up a single "step", our World contains all of the supposed hidden variables that say which child World is which. So I find that Many Worlds seems to invalidate superdeterministic hidden variables.
With other, single-World interpretations, the hidden variables make more sense. What you say would be true. But single-World interpretations are already more complicated than Many Worlds, with or without hidden variables and superdeterminism.
- simiones 3y agoI don't think you're right about the many worlds interpretation here. In the most popular "simple" many worlds interpretation, the whole universe is a QM system described by the universal wavefunction. The "worlds" are just "branches" of the wavefunction that are not entangled with one another. The Schrodinger equation (and the more advanced QFT versions) are fully deterministic differential equations: the state of the universe at time T is fully determined by the state of the universe at time T-x, for any x. This remains true even if x is negative: there is no "arrow of time" in QM, there is no distinction between the past and the future in any QM equations. The only "non-determinism" in Many Worlds is thus of the knowledge kind: you don't know which "world" you happen to be in, so you don't know which result you'll notice. But this is like being spun around a coin: you don't know which face you'll end up looking at, but you know both faces actually exist. All the possible outcomes of any QM event are realized in "some world", there is 0 uncertainty.
- digging 3y agoHm, that could be correct actually. Perhaps Many Worlds is the most deterministic interpretation and I've got it backward - this clearly is not my day job :)