[analytic] Is 't Hooft the Champion of Determinism?
Joseph Polanik
Eray Ozkural wrote:
>Joseph Polanik wrote:
>>do you understand that Bell's inequalities provided an experimental
>>test of the different predictions made by the Copenhagen
>>Interpretation and by deterministic hidden variable alternatives?
>There aren't only two interpretations.
I never said those were the only interpretations.
are you denying that I've accurately described the test that Bell's
inequalities made possible? if so, would you specify the inaccuracy you
claim to see?
>>do you understand that when the experiments were carried out (by
>>Aspect and by others before and after him) hidden variable
>>interpretations of QM were rejected. the results confirmed the
>>predictions of the Copenhagen Interpretation and disconfirmed the
>>predictions of hidden variable theories?
>Did you see Hooft's paper (he is a big shot so his opinion counts very
>much)?
't Hooft is certainly a world class mathematical physicist and nobel
prize laureate; but, that is not itself evidence that his theory is
correct. Einstein was a world-class mathematical physicist; and, he was
wrong about hidden variable theories.
I would like to see some evidence that 't Hooft has succeeded where
Einstein failed; and, you've offered 't Hooft's paper, Determinism
beneath Quantum Mechanics, (http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0212095); so,
let's take a look at it.
now, I'm not qualified to judge the math; and, if someone who is
qualified (Bhup?) were to give an opinion about that, I'd be delighted
to hear it.
I can however, read the english. and the last paragraph indicates that
this paper (a conference presentation) is a work in progress. 't Hooft
says, "There are numerous difficulties left. Most urgent is the need for
a viable model, demonstrating how the mechanism works that we believe to
be responsible for the conspicuous quantum mechanical nature of the
world that we live in. It continues to be difficult to produce a
non-trivial model, one showing particles that interact, for instance,
such that its Hamiltonian is bounded from below."
I've found a later paper by 't Hooft, The Free-Will Postulate in Quantum
Mechanics, http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0701097v1. in this paper he
confronts the Conway-Kochen Free Will Theorem directly (it hadn't been
formulated at the time of the conference paper).
Amazingly enough, 't Hooft 'refutes' the Free Will Theorem by agreeing
with Conway and Kochen that the experimenter *does* in fact have the
freedom to choose which measurement to make. 't Hooft only disagrees
with the usual implication of a free choice (it makes two distantly
separated measurements independent in an Aspect-style experiment of
Bell's inequalities).
according to 't Hooft, when the experimenter makes a choice as to which
measurement to make, that act alters the past so as to maintain the
determinism of the past with respect to the future --- the values that
particles display when eventually measured.
"If we would have been deprived of the possibility to freely choose our
initial states, we would never be able to rely on our model; we would
not know whether our model makes sense at all. In short, we must demand
that our model gives credible scenarios for a universe for any choice of
the initial conditions!
"This is the free will axiom in its modified form. This, we claim, is
why one should really want 'free will' to be there. It is not the free
will to modify the present without affecting the past, but it is the
freedom to choose the initial state, regardless its past, to check what
would happen in the future.
"One cannot modify the present without assuming some modification of the
past. Indeed, the modification of the past that would be associated with
a tiny change in the present must have been quite complex, and almost
certainly it affects particles whose spin one is about to measure.
ironically, to explain away evidence of non-determinism, 't Hooft
assumes the Free Will postulate and gives it the god-like power to alter
the past --- all for the purpose of deceiving other physicists into
thinking that they've discovered evidence of non-determinism.
Joe
--
Nothing Unreal is Self-Aware
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