Determinism

When contemplating super-determinism I remember a conversation with a wild man that probably was a genius and at the same time often quite lost in himself many decades ago. He thought life was deterministic and worked like a clockwork and logic ruled the world. I countered that in deterministic system we can have chaos and hence even a deterministic system can produce a world that to all degrees of precision behaves as it is random in some way, even if everything is in principle pre-determined. To take an example, even if the atoms in the coffee in a coffee mug behaved deterministic following Newtons law, we would not see anything surprising that is not modeled using statistical mechanics e.g. assuming randomness. So I agree fully with Aspect and disagree with Bell that the world very well can be deterministic via hidden variables and the quite unknown super-deterministic condition is making a fool out of a good part of the physics community. Here is a good video discussing this concept Hossenfelder, an excellent channel for the more down to earth types of humans.

So let's see how this applies to Aspects famous experiment. If we consider Aspects experiment Aspect, an experiment that got the Nobel Price 2022 in physics, we are measuring the spin up and spin down of two entangled particles, or in finer words, they have opposite spin in order to preserve a conserved quantity (the addition of them), usually spin. Now imagine that the spin is not a quantity that is fixed in time, but will wobble through space just as earth wobble (precession) this wobbling is not necessary a contradicting of the conservation of spin just as earth does not contradict conservation of momentum. Now if the wobbling is large enough and very fast, we cannot know where in the cycle we are measuring. Now let's put us in Einsteins relativistic shoes and consider the view that there is a parameter in the setting of the detector that chooses where in the cycle to probe the spin and the result may quite naturally depend on these parameters e.g. we have super-determinism or proven that,

$$ \rho(X|x) \neq \rho(X), $$

where \(X\) represent the outcome and \(x\) the setting or choice of where in the cycle to probe the spin. Now physicists will tell you that spin is normally assumed intrinsic and not wobbling, but have they really proved that? At least this illustrate how to argue about a plausible loop hole with a hidden variable mechanism that clearly illustrate the concept of super-determinism. To close this version of the loop hole one need to really prove that there is no concept of wobbling for the spin particles. Note how wobbling also can explain the Stern Gerlach experiment and we might be able to even disprove the non super-determinism with an experiment as discussed in a double slit experiment.

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