Sabine Hossenfelder
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2021–2024
20:30 · 990K views · Dec 18, 2021
Sabine Hossenfelder explains superdeterminism as an interpretation of quantum mechanics, addressing common objections and misconceptions, including the worry that it kills free will or science. She ties it to Bell's theorem and hidden variables.
HN commenters point to it as a clear explanation of Bell's theorem and superdeterminism, though some criticize it as knocking down strawmen.
8 comments from Hacker News
Wow. I actually just saw [a video from Sabine Hossenfelder]( this video ) about exactly this. Long story short, we don't know if quantum nonlocality is real. Bell's Theoreom doesn't prove nonlocality. It proves that locality is impossible with statistical independence, that is, the measurement itself affects the quantum system. We can preserve locality if we also accept superdeterminism, which Sabine succinctly puts as, "what the quantum particle does depends on what measurement will take place." We can accept nonlocality and statistical independence or locality and dependence. The former is taken for granted by Bell and many (most?) physicists today but only because the latter "feels" more spooky to a quantum physicist. The video does the subject justice much better than I can, but the point is that it's not cut and dry!
Randomly found a link to this video on super determinism from his blog and found it super interesting. 100% agree, what is 'free will' anyways? A concept with no scientific definition. Why is it even used to explain anything in quantum mechanics? this video
I question your assumption that in history “things don't happen in history because of (truly) random behaviors converging on some emergent effect.” Firstly there is currently a debate among quantum physics as to the true randomness of what we observe[1][2]. Turns out we don’t actually need true randomness in our models, they just need to appear as if they are random, in other words, the chaotic nature of the system is more important than true randomness. Secondly, society is an emergent effect of individuals behaving in a chaotic manner. So is zeitgeist. To study history without looking at societal changes over time, and without accounting for zeitgeist, is bound to yield a pretty limited insights. I am aware that my analogy between quantum mechanics and the study of history is flawed. The latter is infinity more complex than the former, and deriving laws and creating models is a good fit to study the former but extremely difficult to study the latter. However my point is merely pointing to the fact that atomism (and holism for that matter) is an incomplete philosophy of science, that doesn’t even work in our most fundamental scope. One should be cautious when applying it to the study of history. Or to put it in other words: While ρ(λ | ab) ≠ ρ(λ) is a real possibility in quantum physics likewise it is highly likely that the probability of individual acting in society is not independent from the probability of the same individual acting outside of the influence of that societ
Explanation 0: QM, unlike classical physics, says quantum effects are truly random and unpredictable and we can only know their probability distribution. (Or something like that.) Explanation 1: The universe is not random and doesn't have cause and effect. All scientific experiments appear to work because the whole universe is actually a movie playing out where each new frame has been edited to produce the results we see, but for some reason the author decided to never violate QM. Explanation 2: Unlike what QM predicts (true randomness) there's a finite amount of randomness added at the beginning of the universe, enough that our experiments appear to follow QM, but eventually if we looked hard enough there would be a predictable result with finite entropy. So it's actually regular determinism. A few people claim #2 is true and doesn't imply #1. Everyone else thinks they're the same and doesn't like it for philosophical reasons. this video
I am not aware of any superdeterministic theory that can explain the violation of Bell's inequality. They only argue that a violation of Bell's inequality is not impossible in a superdeterministic local hidden variable theory (but no such theory has been formulated). I suspect this is why Hossenfelder just knocks down a few strawmen in her video on superdeterminism [1], instead of addressing the elephant in the room (experimental violations of Bell's inequality). [1] this video