: That's not the only possible interpretation of Bell's
: theorem. It could be that information can travel
: faster than light or that first-order logic isn't
: capable of interpreting the bizarre behavior of
: electron spin, which is certainly a possibility.
If information can travel faster than light, we can no longer predict the outcome of an event simply by looking at a slice of its past light cone, so a human-created determinist theory is impossible. There's no end to the influences which could affect a given event.
Non-first-order logics which deal more naturally with quantum phenomena do so by incorporating uncertainty into their structure. You can't say that a theory is determinist just because it employs a logic in which "maybe" is a definite answer. :-)
: Are you seriously comparing doubting whether everything's
: random to doubting conservation of momentum? I can't
: tell whether I should really respond to that or not.
Well, of course not everything is random. Conservation of momentum, energy, spin, etc. appear to be universal laws (though somewhat weakened by assorted uncertainty principles), and this constitutes determinism in itself. But many phenomena are effectively random. One may argue over whether they're "really" random or simply non-locally determinist...but either way, yes, the conservation of momentum and the impossibility of constructing a determinist theory of the universe are on approximately equal footing.
: Minimal requirement. OK. I'll buy that.
: It's more than a question of 'pretty'. It's not science
: if it's lucky. We're not asking for more than we
: deserve when we want to know not just what but why.
All science is based on luck. There are an infinite number of theories which explain any given set of observations but differ on certain predictions not yet verifiable. To select between them, we pick the simplest and, yes, the prettiest, and hope that we're lucky enough to have picked the right one. Though so far, we've usually been wrong in that hope.
As for why--science has nothing to say on that count, and never did. "Why do objects fall? Because of gravity, which is governed by the following equations..." That's merely restating the facts in a cleaner fashion. Making your description of the universe simpler and prettier. If you want to call that an explanation of why the universe acts the way it does, feel free...QM certainly doesn't pose a problem there.
--SiliconDream
