: 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.
Well, it's not really a matter of whether you want to believe stuff's random or not. Bell's theorem indicates that it is. You could say it "sounds like giving up" to accept the law of momentum conservation instead of trying to build a reactionless drive, but the universe won't give you any points for doggedly forging on. :-)
: 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.
But if there's a way to predict it, then you can write down a list of numbers based on that prediction. Being able to write down a list of numbers which then turn out to be correct is the minimal requirement for determinism. If you can't do that, you can't determine the outcome in any way.
And, by the way, a list of numbers is a perfectly good scientific theory of dice-rolling. It's definite and it's verifiable; just look at every dice roll over eternity and see if they check out. Sure, it's not a very pretty theory, but it's still valid. And when you get right down to it, every theory that scientists construct is simply a set of instructions for how to figure out that list of numbers. The theory, in the form of words and equations, doesn't contain any more information than the same theory in the form of a number list; it's just a lot shorter and prettier.
--SiliconDream
