: This is the "hidden variable" hypothesis
: Einstein suggested to explain apparently indeterminate
: processes in QM: that something is in fact determining
: those processes' outcomes, but we haven't yet seen it
: and perhaps we can't see it.
: After all, even if dice were completely and hopelessly
: beyond our power to analyze, we could still list a
: die's value each time it's thrown:
: 1,2,5,1,3,5,6,3,2,5,6,1,4,5,6... So if you wrote down
: a list of random numbers beforehand and were lucky
: enough to reproduce the correct list, you'd have a
: perfectly correct theory of what values turn up on
: that die when. The process would be determinist, even
: if we couldn't possibly think up the correct theory to
: describe it without a huge helping of luck.
: And this is where Bell's theorem comes in. It shows that
: for a given process--the "entangled
: particles" experiment is one common
: variant--you'd see certain inequalities in the outcome
: data provided the process was locally determinist in
: *any* way...even the minimal "you can write down
: a list of outcomes" way. QM's predictions do not
: show these inequalities...and neither, apparently,
: does the data gathered by experiment. Reality is not
: even second-hand locally determinate.
: Now Bell's theorem doesn't apply to non-local
: determinism...that is, it still allows for you to be
: able to predict the outcome of an experiment
: *provided* you know everything else about the universe
: at every place and time. So we can't be sure whether
: the "real world" is truly indeterminate, or
: simply non-locally determinate. But as finite beings
: ourselves, we can never be sure of this anyway.
: --SiliconDream
I don't follow a lot of this. What I want to call attention to is the 'hidden variable' hypothesis. This is really a statement of faith. It's the "God doesn't play dice" comment. Presented with observations, what conclusion do you draw? That there's more observing to be done, or that there's no more to be done, and stuff's just random like that?
I'm not sure why it counts as a victory for QM to say things like, "we just can't know!" It sounds like giving up to me. Giving up and trying to save face at the same time. It's making the jump from experiment results to interpretation too quickly.
On a side note, writing down a whimsical prediction of numbers is no theory of dice rolling. That's a straw man if I ever heard one. Sure indeterminacy sounds good compared to that. My claim is that there is in principle a way to determine reliably the roll of a die or the flip of a coin.
-griefmop
