Beyond Quantum Mechanics [video] | Hacker News Reader

Beyond Quantum Mechanics [video]

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57 pointsakakievich17 comments

Some context: t' Hooft the man is treated with great reverence among physicists for his many impressive accomplishments and deep physical insight, but the overwhelming majority think he is dead wrong on quantum mechanics. Even among the small number of nonconformists who would describe their primary work as on the foundations of quantum mechanics, his position is a distinctly minority one.

Einstein also personally believed in complete determinism and lack of free will, but did not formulate a solid argument before he decohered.

See also superdeterminism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

It’s interesting that it’s possible for there to be unfalsifiable theories that are nevertheless true, widely believed, and inform how we might approach everyday problems. While not able to be “proved”, it still may be possible one day to come up with large amounts of evidence in favor of such a theory; Stephen Wolfram’s work and ideas seem like they could be in the right direction, even if it is only the very first initial steps: “If the rules are simple enough, one might be able to do something that seems quite outrageous: just search the universe of all possible rules, and find our own physical universe.” - https://blog.wolfram.com/2007/09/11/my-hobby-hunting-for-our...

While the scientific method is extraordinarily effective for questions in its domain of applicability, there are questions that exist out of that domain on which we can nevertheless make progress.

(I'm new to this concept) Does free will in the context mean, people's actions could be predicted? Is it just referring to particles as having free will?

If it's people, is it generally considered that if a person could be accurately modeled and predicted, then they have no free will?

Superdeterminism implies that people’s actions are fully determined for their entire lives, but we would likely not be able to predict them in any meaningful way even if we had access to all the necessary information, because the computation would be too large to handle. (The “you need a computer more powerful than the universe to compute the universe faster than the universe computes itself” argument.)

In the PDF book linked elsewhere in these comments, t’ Hooft makes the argument that what we mean colloquially by “free will” is more of an emotional definition, and he proposes a rigorous scientific definition that may be more productive.

(Of course, given certain neural data from a person, we can predict certain actions on the order of 100’s of ms in advance of the person’s conscious awareness of choice, so...)

Any summary of the key difference. As long as it opinion with some ground, it would be nice to see competition of ideas not just one voice

If I recall, t' Hooft thinks that at very short distances nature is described by something like a (local) cellular automata. This is in tension with Bell's inequality, so I think he postulates superdeterminism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

If you're interested in learning t'Hooft's theory in detail here's a link to download his book for FREE. You have to pay for a physical copy but Springer has decided to make this book open access.

https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319412849

He gets to the meat of his argument at 22:37

https://youtu.be/jvsTVlwek-g?t=1357

Essentially that the Bell theorem is wrong because his definition of causality was incorrect. I'm in no position to comment on it one way or another, but it seems like quite an odd forum to be presenting his case.

A less odd forum, where he presents his ideas, is his book "The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics":

> https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-41285-6

Empirically, what draws laymen to science talks is the star power of the speaker, not the correctness of the talk. A talk by a Nobel laureate will always be vastly better attended then one by a qualified nobody, even if the former is taking an unusual position disputed by other laureates and the rest of the community, and the latter is skillfully presenting the community consensus.

Make an absurd assumption get an absurd conclusion.

One quantum automata question I have is this: is there a rigid lattice that the photons exists on?

If one photon is able to exist at any arbitrary position and at any arbitrary spin orientation it would seem simple to imagine an event space between two photons having a distance between 0 and the plank length

Unless there is a lattice that ensures that all photons are minimally oriented at a distance of at least a plank length in all directions and whose spins must orient along the lattice in 90deg transformations

Possibly but not necessarily; one of the models is where the fabric of spacetime itself is constructed from an automata where individual graph edges reconfigure as part of the evolution of the automata; this could be responsible for relativistic distortions of spacetime.

It gets really interesting when you consider that the lowest-level edges do not have to obey what appears to be local speed-of-light restrictions — entangled photons could have a “thread” cutting across the higher-level emergent spacetime that could provide a simple mechanism for “action at a distance” that does not actually allow external information to be transferred from one location to another, just information internal to the functioning of a superdeterministic universe. (Though, strictly speaking, if you believe in superdeterminism, you don’t need such a mechanism, but it could be useful for convincing other humans.)

I believe so. Here is a recent review article: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.13318.pdf

While the math in this paper is way too dense for me to fully comprehend, the larger premise here -- that the mysteries of quantum mechanics as presently understood mask a deeper, deterministic, discontinuous regime -- is actually gaining ground in many quarters.

(Disclaimer: I co-authored a paper referenced in the article)

> (Disclaimer: I co-authored a paper referenced in the article)

The submission links to a video, not a paper. Thus: what paper are you referring to?

I should have specified I was talking about the book "The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" mentioned in the thread.

The paper he references is "Two-state, Reversible, Universal Cellular Automata in Three Dimensions"

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