3 ms·
If you look at polls of physicists over the past few decades, many believed that Von Neumann's proof ruled out all hidden variable theories. This was wrong. Man
by naasking 2y ago
If you look at polls of physicists over the past few decades, many believed that Von Neumann's proof ruled out all hidden variable theories. This was wrong. Many others also believed that Bell's theorem ruled out hidden variable theories. This was also wrong, and Bell himself was actually a fan of Bohmian mechanics, which is a non-local hidden variable theory, and one of his motivations for deriving his famous theorem.
All of this is to say that being a physicist doesn't make you an expert in quantum foundations. Neither am I, but I've read a diversity of literature from experts that work on quantum foundations, so I am aware of the range of misconceptions on this.
- naasking 2y agoSee here for one of the surveys I mentioned: https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.00676 https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.00676 To "What is the message of the observed violations of Bell's inequality?", a whopping 37% believed that it ruled out hidden variables entirely, even though Bohmian mechanics has been a thing since the the 1950s. 21% said Bohmian mechanics was explicitly incompatible with Bell's theorem in answering the question "What are your reasons for NOT favoring De Broglie - Bohm theory?", which is clear nonsense. There's still a lot of confusion about quantum foundations, even among physicists. The fight over superdeterminism has only just begun, even though de Broglie's "double solution" to QM has been around for almost a century as the first superdeterministic theory. And this is ironic given GR is a theory of deterministic evolution of objects over a 4D manifold, eg. the future is already written, but taking this same approach to QM is heresy, even though this would provide some conceptual unity that might bear fruits towards unification.