Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Superdeterminism: The path we didn't take

#1
C C Offline
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/1...-take.html

EXCERPT (Sabine Hossenfelder): . . . What the heck is Superdeterminism?, you ask. Superdeterminism is what it takes to solve the measurement problem of quantum mechanics. [...] The more I’ve been thinking about this, the more it seems to me that quantum measurement is the mother of all problems. And the more I am talking about what I have been thinking about, the crazier I sound. I’m not even surprised no one wants to hear what I think is the obvious solution: Superdeterminism! No one besides Gerard ‘t Hooft, that is. And that no one listens to ‘t Hooft, despite him being a Nobel laureate, doesn’t exactly make me feel optimistic about my prospects of getting someone to listen to me.

The big problem with Superdeterminism is that the few people who know what it is, seem to have never thought about it much, and now they are stuck on the myth that it’s an unscientific “conspiracy theory”. Superdeterminism, so their story goes, is the last resort of the dinosaurs who still believe in hidden variables. According to these arguments, Superdeterminism requires encoding the outcome of every quantum measurement in the initial data of the universe, which is clearly outrageous. Not only that, it deprives humans of free will, which is entirely unacceptable.

[...] Tim Palmer turned out to not only be a climate physicist with an interest in the foundations of quantum mechanics, he also turned out to be remarkably persistent. ... Tim, in return, couldn’t possibly have known I was working on Superdeterminism. In February, I had just been awarded a small grant from the Fetzer Franklin Fund to hire a postdoc to work on the topic, but the details weren’t public information.

Indeed, Tim and I didn’t figure out we have a common interest until I interviewed him on a paper he had written about something entirely different, namely how to quantify the uncertainty of climate models. [...] That’s when I finally realized Tim’s been writing about Superdeterminism when I was still in high school, long before even ‘t Hooft got into the game. Even more interestingly, he wrote his PhD thesis in the 1970s about general relativity...

Tim and I then spent some months accusing each other of not really understanding how Superdeterminism works. In the end, we found we agree on more points than not and wrote a paper to explain what Superdeterminism is and why the objections often raised against it are ill-founded. Today, this paper is on the arXiv... (MORE - details)
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Evolution didn't make us human, culture did C C 2 115 Dec 21, 2022 07:45 PM
Last Post: Magical Realist
  Big Bang didn't happen: What do the James Webb images really show? + TV set & the BB C C 0 109 Aug 12, 2022 08:52 PM
Last Post: C C
  The "superdeterminism resolve dilemmas around free will" proposal C C 1 78 Dec 30, 2021 08:10 PM
Last Post: Syne



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)