The Harvard physicist Jacob Barandes proved that quantum mechanics is mathematically equivalent to a statistical theory with history dependence in his paper here. There is thus always a rather simple and intuitive explanation for most quantum mechanical phenomena without resorting to things like multiverses or collapsing wavefunctions, but that it is just a statistical theory + history dependence.

I will use this simulator to illustrate: https://ophysics.com/l3.html

Rotating only the first 90 degrees blocks the light.

Rotating only the second 90 degrees blocks the light.

Rotating both 90 individually blocks the light.

Rotating the first at 45 degrees and the second at 90 degrees allows light to pass through.

Rotating the first at 90 degrees and the second at 45 degrees does NOT allow light to pass through.

To say that there is history dependence means the behavior of the particles is a function over its history, and so the behavior of the particle during an interaction can change if its history is different. If not all the light is blocked by the time it reaches the second one, then the behavior of the photon at the second one can be different if, in its history, it had interacted with the first one rotated at 45 degrees, and thus the second one may not block all the light as we would normally expect it to because you have changed the history of the particle.

In classical statistics, you can represent the statistical outcome of an interaction according to p(t)=f(U(t),p(t-1)) whereby U is the definition of the operator describing the interaction and p is the probability distribution. Mathematically, you can decompose the quantum state into two real-valued vectors according to its two degrees of freedom where one is a probability vector, common in classical statistics, and the other is the phase, and the way the probability vector evolves with an interaction can be defined by p(t)=f(U(t),p(t-1),h(t-1)) where h is the phase.

The phase can be interpreted as a sufficient statistic over the system’s historical trajectory, because you can get rid of the phase entirely by expanding out h(t-1) over its whole history such that you get:

p(t)=f(U(t),p(t-1),g(U(t-1),p(t-2),g(U(t-2),p(t-3),…)))

This extension would stop at a base case. It is quite trivial to prove that a degenerate distribution would be a base case, and so if there is a point in the system’s history where you know its value with certainty, then you can stop the expansion there, and thus the phase disappears from the evolution rule. Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use the phase mathematically, you just don’t interpret it as a physical entity, but as a sufficient statistic over the system’s statistical history.

You can think of each physical interaction like a black box the particle enters, the box alters its state, and then it leaves the black box. The black box is described by a function, which takes the particle’s pre-interaction state as an input, and then outputs its post-interaction state. You can conceive of quantum mechanics as just a form of statistical mechanics whereby the statistical behavior of the particle is a function not just of the particle’s statistical state right now and the current operator, but of all its previous statistical states and previous operators.

Each black box is, in a sense, “aware” of the whole history of the particle which enters it. The second polarizer “knows” that the particle had just interacted with the previous one at a 45 degree angle, so it changes its behavior accordingly. If we express it like this:

p(t)=f(U(t),p(t-1),g(U(t-1),p(t-2)))

Then the behavior of the second polarizer given by this function can change if U(t-1), the previous polarizer’s orientation, is changed.

Nah. They try to defend “value indefiniteness,” a position which is largely indefensible but has become very popular in academia despite having been all but ruled out, and should go the way of the aether. A physical theory needs observables with well-defined conditions under which they obtain well-defined properties or else it is not possible to make a single empirical prediction with the theory.

If you claim particles do not obtain definite values for their observables at all, this is the Everettian interpretation, the “Many Worlds” interpretation. But this trivially doesn’t work because, again, if particles never obtain definite values at all, then you cannot make a single empirical predictions with it. The theory has no connection to empirical reality. See Tim Maudlin’s paper “Can the World be Only Wavefunction?”

Indeed, whenever we have a statistical distribution, we presuppose that there exists an underlying real state of the system, but we are just ignorant of it. In order to derive the Born rule distribution, then Everettian mechanics must, at some point, admit to there being definite values to the observables. But to do that would be equivalent to a “collapse” approach, which they want to avoid, so they try to use arguments involving decision theory and such, but, as Adrian Kent showed in his paper “One world versus many: the inadequacy of Everettian accounts of evolution, probability, and scientific confirmation,” these explanations are always circular, as well as the paper “Epistemic Separability and Everettian Branches: A Critique of Sebens and Carroll” by R. Dawid and S. Friederich.

Indeed, Everettians also love to claim that their view is “local,” but if their viewpoint really is mathematically consistent with quantum mechanics, then, at some point, it must reproduce Born rule probabilities, meaning it must reproduce violations of Bell inequalities, and so it cannot be local, as shown in Aurélien Drezet’s paper "An Elementary Proof That Everett’s Quantum Multiverse Is Nonlocal: Bell-Locality and Branch-Symmetry in the Many-Worlds Interpretation". They often get around this by just redefining locality to be in terms of linearity or no-signaling, but any interpretation can be local if we just change the meaning of locality.

Of course, there are also “collapse” interpretations. The collapse, obviously, cannot just occur “when you look at it,” or else you end up devolving into crackpot solipsism, as per the “Wigner’s friend” thought experiment in Wigner’s “Remarks on the Mind Body Problem.” The “collapse” must occur before then, and it also must be an invariant collapse, or else the minds of other observers would depend upon how you personally look at them, and their own minds would not have independent existence. “Collapse” thus can only be a consistent view of physical reality if the collapse both occurs under well-defined conditions and is invariant.

But these are pretty much ruled out by John Bell’s paper “Against ‘Measurement’” which points out that the “collapse” approach cannot constitute a physical interpretation of quantum mechanics because orthodox quantum mechanics does not tell you when this “collapse” should occur, under what well-defined conditions, and so it does not give you an unambiguous ontology.

If this “collapse” really occurs, it is a non-reversible process, yet all unitary evolution operators are reversible. That means if I build a measuring device, and you give a complete physical description of the measuring device in terms of quantum mechanics, then an interaction with that measuring device would be described via unitary operators, and thus would be reversible, and so orthodox quantum mechanics would predict that an interaction with the measuring device is reversible, whereas a “collapse” approach would not.

This would in principle lead to different empirical predictions, as we would have something interact with a measuring device and then attempt to reverse the interaction, and the predictions between a “collapse” theory and orthodox quantum mechanics would deviate from one another. Theories like GRW and the Diosi-Penrose model are thus separate theories, not interpretations of the same theory. A physical collapse model can only be consistent if you believe orthodox quantum mechanics is simply wrong.

The “measurement problem” within orthodox quantum mechanics stems from the assumption of value indefiniteness. Nobody has proved it is possible to make quantum mechanics consistent with value indefiniteness without running into the measurement problem, and it is my position that it is not logically possible to do so. The measurement problem is a proof-by-contradiction that value indefiniteness is just an untenable position, an outdated position that has largely been ruled out but people still cling to their outdated ways due to preconceptions.

In MinutePhysics’ video, he does not defend any of the absurdities of the worldview he is proposing. He just attacks the alternative because it would have to not be spatiotemporal and calls that “crazy.” That’s not an argument, that’s an appeal to incredulity. There is no law of logic that says nature must necessarily be interpreted as spatiotemporal. If my two options are (1) believe the empirical evidence that demonstrates reality is spatiotemporal, or (2) adopt an entirely incoherent position that descends into irreconcilable contradictions in order to delude myself into believing it is spatiotemporal, then I am going to pick #1 every time, and saying it is “crazy” is a bit of an absurdity.

Indeed what is even more ridiculous about MinutePhysics’ and 3blue1brown’s dismissal of such a view as “crazy” is that it was also the view of John Bell, the guy who developed the theorem. Apparently, John Bell was “crazy,” yet, it was Bell who had the deep insight into the theory in order to develop this theorem in the first place, and so clearly he understood it better than a couple of YouTubers.

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The people who deny reality exists (“Schrodinger’s cat”) do so specifically because they want to preserve locality (no “Spooky action at a distance”), because Bell proved in 1964 that physical reality is not compatible with locality. If you accept that reality is not local (“Spooky action at a distance”) then there is no reason to deny realism (“Schrodinger’s cat”).

QM is a lot easier to understand when we stop pretending a theory that only gives you statistical results somehow has no relevance to statistics. Every “paradox” can always be understood and resolved by applying a statistical analysis. If you apply such a statistical analysis to entangled systems, let’s say you have two qubits with their own bit values b1 and b2, you find that if you apply a unitary operator to just b1, there are cases where the way in which this stochastically perturbs b1 has a dependence upon the value of b2.

You could not send a signal to b2 by perturbing b1 because perturbing b1 has no effect on b2, rather, the way in which b1 stochastically changes merely depends upon the current state of b2. You might think maybe you could send a signal the other way. If b1 depends upon b2, then you could perturb b2 to alter b1. But the dependence is always symmetrical, such that if you apply a stochastic perturbation to b2 the way in which it will change will depend upon the value of b1, and so it becomes a vicious circle.

It is non-local in the sense that the way in which one changes depends upon the value of the other far away, but not in the sense that perturbing one locally alters the value of the one far away, and the dependence is always symmetrically mutual, so there is no way to signal between them.

As it is normally explained, it’s definitely fake. There is no reason to believe particles turn into waves when you’re not looking and turn back into particles when you look, and believing this demonstrably leads to irreconcilable paradoxes. Dmitry Blokhintsev was correct that the particles are just particles, and the “wave” is a property of its stochastic dynamics over an ensemble of systems. The wave is part of the nomology: it tells you how the particles stochastically behave in the aggregate, but the particles are still particles at all times. Ontologically, they are particles. Nomologically, their stochastic dynamics in an ensemble of systems converges to wave-like behavior.

Nope. Quantum mechanics is just a statistical theory. Anything beyond that is a delusion from crackpot quantum mystics, which sadly even your views are popular among academics, because quantum woo permeates both the non-academic and academic circles alike.

I think you’re conflating mathematical and philosophical realness and then Principle of Explosion-ing your way into hating on physicsts.

Waa waa boo hoo. You can cry about me criticizing crackpot quantum mysticism by saying “stop hatin’ bro 😢😢😢😢” but that doesn’t magically make your crackpot mysticism justifiable. You have the right to have incoherent mystical beliefs, but I also have the right to criticize them. If you don’t want to be criticized then don’t post them on a public forum.

I think you’re conflating mathematical and philosophical realness and then Principle of Explosion-ing your way into hating on physicsts. Quantum indefinite interpretations still result in the same mathematical predictions about observations

Did you read what I wrote at all? This is a criticism about the crackpot anti-realist claims. Yes, you can argue that objective reality doesn’t exist, that all that exists is what you are directly observing in the direct moment of the observation and nothing exists outside of your direct gaze, and that you have a mathematical model for predicting what will show up in your direct gaze, and that this model makes the right predictions.

If that is just your own personal belief, I’d think you’re crazy, but whatever. If, however, you start lying and claiming that this is somehow implied by the linear algebra, that quantum mechanics somehow “proves” your solipsistic crackpottery, then I am going to call you out on being a crackpot quantum mystic. If you don’t want to be criticized then don’t spread your quantum mysticism on a public forum.

so all your talk about MW saying your memory is a lie is just obvious bullshit.

Because you don’t understand the mathematics so you don’t understand what I am talking about. You have a Laymen’s interpretation of MW you got from YouTube videos that paints it as just saying that different classical worlds occur in different parallel branches of a multiverse. In your mind, you think what MW is claiming is that if a photon has a 50%/50% chance of being reflected/transmitted at a beam splitter, then the world splits into two classical branches where in one the observer measures the photon having been reflected and in the other they measure the photon having been transmitted.

You think what I am saying is absurd because you get all your info from YouTube videos and don’t even understand what is seriously being advocated by these crackpots as you don’t actually read the academic literature on the subject. No, what they are claiming is indeed far more absurd, which is that the photon does neither of those things, it takes no real trajectories at all in 3D space in any sense, it doesn’t even exist as a distinct object in the world.

“Thus in our interpretation of the Everett theory there is no association of the particular present with any particular past. And the essential claim is that this does not matter at all. For we have no access to the past. We have only our ‘memories’ and ‘records’. But these memories and records are in fact present phenomena. The instantaneous configuration of the xs can include clusters which are markings in notebooks, or in computer memories, or in human memories. These memories can be of the initial conditions in experiments, among other things, and of the results of those experiments. The theory should account for the present correlations between these present phenomena. And in this respect we have seen it to agree with ordinary quantum mechanics, in so far as the latter is unambiguous.” … “Everett’s replacement of the past by memories is a radical solipsism—extending to the temporal dimension the replacement of everything outside my head by my impressions, of ordinary solipsism or positivism. Solipsism cannot be refuted. But if such a theory were taken seriously it would hardly be possible to take anything else seriously. So much for the social implications. It is always interesting to find that solipsists and positivists, when they have children, have life insurance.”

— John Bell, “Quantum Mechanics for Cosmologists”

MW is even more crackpot nonsense than typical anti-realist claims, because at least the solipsist believes in what they can observe in the moment. You simply cannot derive what is empirically observed from MW because it has no connection at all to the real world, and so it only reflects one’s ignorance on this subject to claim that MW actually has a formula for making empirical predictions. They simply do not.

MW is anti-realist not just in the properties you are not observing, but even in the properties you observe, and just claims reality is literally a mathematical function, like a Platonic realm but rather than all mathematics it is just one function ψ(x,t). We obviously cannot observe pure mathematical functions. You need something in the mathematical model, some mathematical symbol, that refers to something that we can empirically observe, usually called an observable, yet there are no observables in MW so there is no possibility of actually making an empirical prediction with it.

“The gigantic, universal ψ wave that contains all the possible worlds is like Hegel’s dark night in which all cows are black: it does not account, per se, for the phenomenological reality that we actually observe. In order to describe the phenomena that we observe, other mathematical elements are needed besides ψ: the individual variables, like X and P, that we use to describe the world. The Many Worlds interpretation does not explain them clearly. It is not enough to know the ψ wave and Schrödinger’s equation in order to define and use quantum theory: we need to specify an algebra of observables, otherwise we cannot calculate anything and there is no relation with the phenomena of our experience. The role of this algebra of observables, which is extremely clear in other interpretations, is not at all clear in the Many Worlds interpretation.”

— Carlo Rovelli, “Helgoland”

Even the crackpot solipsist’s views are more coherent than the views of the crackpot Many Worlder’s views.

Tim Maudlin has a good lecture on this fact I will link below. I’d also recommend his paper “Can the World be Only Wavefunction?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us7gbWWPUsA

Again, my criticism is not solely that these views are obviously crackpot mystical nonsense (they are). The problem with quantum mystics is not just that they are mystics, but that they pretend quantum mechanics bolsters their mystical claims. Nothing in the linear algebra of the model comes close to having the hint of an air of implying these things. If you want to believe that personally, go ahead, but stop pretending these crank views are in any way backed by physics.

The rampant spread of quantum mysticism in academic circles is a problem because these physicists who buy into it don’t always keep to themselves, many go to the media and start trying to deceive the public that solipsism is somehow proved by physics. Some even manage to get peer-reviewed papers published in academic journals claiming objective reality doesn’t exist, which then crackpot idealists like Bernardo Kastrup latch onto to “prove” we all live in a grand “cosmic consciousness” because they have an academic paper and real physicists backing their views.

When even the physics departments are becoming overrun with crackpot mystics then we have a serious problem because the public trusts these people. I hold them to a higher standard than I would hold a random charlatan like Deepak Chopra which I don’t expect to tell the truth anyways. It bothers me much more when I see physicists like Chris Ferrie publishing Medium articles where he claims quantum mechanics “denies reality” or Mithuna Yoganathan deliberately lying about the mathematics with claims repeatedly debunked in the academic literature to push the nonsense that the mathematics proves there is a multiverse “if you just take it seriously” than I do some random Twitter user saying some quantum mystical nonsense. These people exploit their credentials to push their own mystical mumbo jumbo views.

You should generally dismiss what physicists in academia say about metaphysics, because crackpot quantum mysticism is rampantly popular and so you rarely get anything coherent from them.

I would recommend you check out my article here. Most academics in the physics departments believe in a property called “value indefiniteness” which amounts to crackpot solipsism based on poorly reasoned arguments that obviously cannot possibly be correct because Louis de Broglie presented a counterexample decades before these crackpot arguments were even made.

This is a strange phenomenon that the physicist John Bell points out in his paper “On the Impossible Pilot Wave.” The “pilot wave” theory is a model which is mathematically equivalent to standard quantum mechanics yet is value definite, and was first presented by de Broglie in the Solvay conference in 1927. Yet, despite this, academics from John von Neumann to Richard Feynman would go on to publish “impossibility theorems” trying to prove value definiteness is impossible, even though they all had a counterexample sitting in their lap.

Bell would then go on to publish several papers showing where the flaws in all their arguments are, but it had no impact on academia, and solipsism remains the overwhelmingly dominant position. Indeed “value indefiniteness” really is just a renaming of solipsism to make it sound less ridiculous. It literally means that particles have no values when you’re not looking at them, and since macroscopic objects, even other human beings, are made up of particles, it naturally applies to them as well: value indefiniteness = other people don’t exist if you’re not looking at them.

Many Worlds arose from this same crackpot delusion of physicists who recognize that solipsism is kinda silly but don’t want to give up value indefiniteness… which is literally solipsism. So they try to find a middle ground between solipsism and solipsism and their views just end up becoming coherent.

Bell points out in his paper “Quantum Mechanics for Cosmologists” that Many Worlds is still basically just solipsism but with a lot of extra baggage to confuse people to what they are even arguing so it is not so obvious that it is. A lot of Laymen falsely think Many Worlds is just the claim that there are many classical worlds. If I go to measure a photon in a superposition of both possible paths, then they think it means there will be a classical world where I perceive it on one path and another classical world where I perceive it on another path.

No, Many Worlds is even more incoherent, because no one perceives anything on any path at all. There are simply no objects which travel through 3D space within the interpretation. Consider that you walk from your living room to your bedroom, and you remember clearly that you did that. Since Many Worlds is still value indefinite, there does not exist any definite trajectories in 3D space, and so your memory has to be a complete lie. That didn’t happen. Indeed, no matter how strongly you feel that there is a computer/phone screen in front of you right now, in Many Worlds, that also must be a lie, because no objects exist in 3D space so there cannot be an object with a definite value in front of you right now.

This is what Bell saw as so absurd about it. Everything we perceive and believe we have perceived has to be largely disconnected from the real world, almost as if we’re living in a fake simulation, a brain in a vat, that is entirely disconnected from what is “actually going on.” Many Worlds is more batshit idiotic than you are led to believe from YouTube videos. It does not follow from the science at all, but follows from the crackpot quantum mysticism of “value indefiniteness,” which has no basis in the mathematics at all. Even many of the believers in academia admit that no one knows how to actually derive what we actually perceive from the interpretation.

Indeed, to some extent, it has always been both necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, and to separate them, so as to reduce his problems to manageable proportions; for evidently, if in our practical technical work we tried to deal with the whole of reality all at once, we would be swamped…However, when this mode of thought is applied more broadly…then man ceases to regard the resulting divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and his world as actually constituted of separately existent fragments…fragmentation is continually being brought about by the almost universal habit of taking the content of our thought for ‘a description of the world as it is’. Or we could say that, in this habit, our thought is regarded as in direct correspondence with objective reality. Since our thought is pervaded with differences and distinctions, it follows that such a habit leads us to look on these as real divisions, so that the world is then seen and experienced as actually broken up into fragments.

— David Bohm, “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”

Fields aren’t observable. If I sprinkle some magnetic filings around a magnetic field, I will see the filings move, and even conform to the force lines of the field. But, at the end of the day, what I am seeing is the behavior of the particles, not the field. If all that exists are fields, then reality wouldn’t be observable, which clearly contradicts with what we observe.

Of course, you say that there “observable points” added to the field, but I don’t see how this is different form just saying that there are particles in the field, since that’s basically all a particle is, an observable point. Quite literally. Particles are understood as dimensionless points which are defined in terms of their observables.

Quantum physics in no way implies everything is a wave. Physics academia is just filled with crackpot mystics who have an obsession over constantly inventing “paradigm shifts” and chasing the most bizarre interpretations of the mathematics possible and never have presented a shred of empirical evidence that their whacko crackpot claims have any basis in factual reality.

You can just split out the wavefunction into its real and imaginary parts, as two separate real-valued vectors, and convert it from Cartesian to polar form, and then it is clearly just a stochastic theory with non-classical stochastic dynamics, in fact the formula for evolving the probabilities is just the classical one + an additional non-linear term. I created a whole visualizer for this.

That is the simplified case for quantum information science / quantum computing. But you can do it in quantum physics as well, in fact doing it for particle positions is what led to Bohm developing is pilot wave theory, where the additional non-linear term is the quantum potential. We have always known that quantum mechanics is just a non-classical stochastic theory for decades, which there may or may not be an underlying deterministic reality, but there is no magic to it as if the entire world is a giant vibrating single multiverse wave. They are just particles. The only thing that is wave-like is their stochastic dynamics.

But no one will tell you that because people are obsessed with chasing the most whimsical interpretations possible and lie to people about the mathematics that it somehow inherently necessitates their quantum woo.

Communication through entanglement still requires transmitting all the information you are trying to communicate through a physical communication channel like radio or some other channel like lasers or whathaveyou. The only supposed “benefit” of the communication is that it prevents undetected eavesdropping. Although, that’s hardly even a great benefit, because you want to prevent eavesdropping, not just detect it, because that means the presence of an eavesdropper would kill all communication. There is thus not even a practical security benefit for communication through entanglement. It’s largely overhyped. May have some niche use cases but not anything revolutionary.

Sadly it’s all nonsense. If Einstein was alive today he would denounce special relativity. Modern day physics has devolved into a religious cult. Yes, please read Einstein, because everyone lies about what he believed and does not represent his concerns with modern physics accurately.

When Einstein introduced his theory of relativity in 1905, it made zero new predictions, because it was mathematically equivalent to a theory Lorentz presented in 1904. Einstein’s critique of Lorentz’s theory was simply that it contained a privileged reference frame, these days called a preferred foliation, which was undetectable. If you can’t detect it, it is redundant for experimental predictions, and so it should be thrown out. This gives you a different mental picture to what is going on, since Lorentz’s theory was one of absolute spacetime where deviations in rods and are clocks are treated as deviations in rods and clocks from absolute time due to physical effects. If I mess with your clock so it runs slower, that doesn’t prove time slows down. Einstein’s theory, by dropping the postulate that there exists a preferred foliation, drops the concept of absolute time, and this inevitably leads you to the conclusion that time and space really do deviate.

Good. Einstein removed something unnecessary for predictions. What is the problem? The problem is that in 1964 the physicist John Bell published a paper proving that special relativity simply lacks sufficient structure to take into account objective reality when factoring in quantum mechanical predictions. Bell’s theorem has nothing to do with determinism as it is often misunderstood. When Bell talked about “hidden variables” he was not talking about some additional hidden parameter that would make quantum theory deterministic. He was talking about the very concept of object permanence, the basis of philosophical realism.

If I observe an object at time t=0, t=1, and then again at t=2, then run the entire experiment again from the beginning with the same initial conditions and observe the object at t=0 and t=2 but not t=1, clearly, this time I didn’t observe it at t=1, but that was just by happenstance. I could have counterfactually observed it at t=1, and I know, from other experiments, that I would perceive something there if I looked at t=1 under this counterfactual, even though I just so happened not to. We thus must conclude that the system has an observable property at t=1, even though we did not observe, because we could have under a counterfactual.

This is the bedrock of philosophical realism, the very notion of objective reality, that things exist when we are not looking as long as you can make an argument that they could be observed under some counterfactual. Directly being observed in the present moment is not necessary to say it exists. Even if I cannot see you right now, I can still believe you exist in objective reality because I can imagine a counterfactual scenario where I do observe you, such if you were my friend and invited me over.

When Bell was talking about “hidden variables,” this is what he was talking about: the idea that particles can be considered to have physical properties even when you are not looking at them. These properties are sometimes called in the literature the “ontic state.” The ontic state may evolve deterministically, or in a way that is fundamentally random. It does not matter. The notion of philosophical realism is that systems possess ontic states when you are not looking at them and then these ontic states explain what shows up on your measurement device when you look.

What Bell demonstrates in his 1964 paper is that special relativity does not have sufficient structure to include the ontic states of particles when you factor in the statistical predictions of quantum mechanics. There is thus an incompatibility between objective reality and special relativity. It turns out that the exact additional structure you need is the preferred foliation, which was originally deleted by Einstein. But if you read Einstein’s work, his main concern of Bohr’s interpretation of quantum theory was not lack of determinism, but lack of realism. He gave an example of atomic decay, where if you leave a radioactive atom in a box to decay and a certain amount of time has passed, it must have emitted or not emitted a particle within that time frame. It must have done one or the other, but Bohr’s interpretation did not allow you to admit that it did, because that is equivalent to adopting an ontic state for the atom in the box.

When encountered with the contradiction between special relativity and objective reality, physicists chose to abandon objective reality. That is religion. Not science. The Copenhagen interpretation then became dominant, which argues physics is not about reality but purely about what shows up on measuring devices, but can say nothing about reality independently of what you measure. And don’t even get me started on Many Worlds which is a cope that tries to find a middle ground by claiming the abstract mathematical realm used to predict what shows up on measuring devices is the objective reality, devolving into a logically incoherent Platonism.

It’s clearly a religious cult as no evidence was needed to even establish this position. Niels Bohr convinced physicists to adopt the Copenhagen interpretation at the Solvay conference in 1927. This was decades prior to the publication of Bell’s theorem, and even more decades prior before the Nobel prize was given for confirming Bell’s theorem. Almost a century prior before Bell’s theorem was experimentally verified, the physics community already decided objective reality doesn’t exist.

Part of this nonsense comes back to Occam’s razor. Occam’s razor only makes sense as a principle if we just so happen to be lucky to be born into a universe without any physical redundancies. If there are any physical redundancies in the physical world itself, then the mathematical description of the world will also contain mathematical redundancies. If you then remove the mathematical redundancies, you then have an incorrect picture of the world, even though it still technically makes the right predictions. Physicists have taken Occam’s razor to such an extreme that they have found that they can remove objective reality from the mathematics and only care about what shows up on measuring devices and make the right predictions.

They then go around lying and in indoctrination people into their superstition that this is how we should really think, that we should really believe that there is no cat in the box until you open the lid and look, or even that time and space are unquestionably fundamentally relative, and if you don’t believe these things unquestionably then you are a “science denier,” even though there is not a shred of empirical evidence for them. Special relativity never once made a single original prediction that could be verified in experiment which was not already predicted by Lorentz’s theory, and taking it too seriously forces you to drop belief in the very existence of an objective reality independent of observation/measurement, or devolve into incoherent talk about objective reality being the Platonic realm of the pure mathematics itself, as if we all live inside of a giant invisible infinite-dimensional wave.

If Einstein saw Bell’s theorem he would have renounced his own theory of special relativity as Einstein was a committed realist. He falsely believed he could make realism compatible with relativistic locality, and there is just no way he would have opted to deny the very existence of objective reality if he saw Bell prove that these views are fundamentally incompatible. He would have conceded that special relativity does indeed need additional structure and that removing it was a mistake. We already know that the objectively real universe in the real world has a preferred foliation and we have measured it, and so the idea that it is so absurd to think one exists when it is necessary to make the empirical evidence consistent with a model of objective reality is rather unconvincing.

All of the supposed “quantum weirdness” stems from this obsession with refusing to add back the structure needed to make quantum theory into a realist theory. When you add the structure back, you can then fit the empirical predictions of relativistic quantum mechanics to a theory of point particles moving in Newtonian spacetime. You end up with a picture that is actually coherent and comprehensible. But a regular old boring realist theory of nature doesn’t sell books or get clicks on articles. You gotta keep brainwashing people into believing that physics is “weird” to keep the money flowing, and painting everyone who disagrees as “science deniers” even though we all agree on the same empirical evidence and no one is calling that into question.

But why then had Born not told me of this “pilot wave?” If only to point out what was wrong with it? Why did von Neumann not consider it? More extraordinarily, why did people go on producing “impossibility” proofs, after 1952, and as recently as 1978? When even Pauli, Rosenfeld, and Heisenberg, could produce no more devastating criticism of Bohm’s version than to brand it as “metaphysical” and “ideological?” Why is the pilot wave picture ignored in text books? Should it not be taught, not as the only way, but as an antidote to the prevailing complacency? To show that vagueness, subjectivity, and indeterminism, are not forced on us by experimental facts, but by deliberate theoretical choice?

— John Bell

There is no mystery. Realism requires object permanence, and object permanence requires that you believe in counterfactual statements. If I measure something at t=0 and t=2, I could have measured it at t=1, and so you have to believe it had a value at t=1 or else you devolve into solipsism. If you believe an objective reality exists at all then you have to uphold these kinds of counterfactuals or else you have no basis to believe that objective reality exists independently of you measuring or observing it.

Bell’s theorem proves clearly proves that special relativity simply lacks sufficient structure needed to give a realist account of the world. Special relativity is not compatible with objective reality. Rather than accepting this conclusion and admitting special relativity needs additional structure added to it, physicists almost universally came to the consensus that we should reject the very idea that there exists an objective reality independent of observation to preserve the sacred status of special relativity

This became the dominant Copenhagen interpretation. Physics is just about what shows up in measuring devices, during observation, not about objective reality. Many Worlds then showed up later as a cope. It arose as a middle-ground by arguing the mathematics used to predict what shows up on measuring devices is objective reality, as if we live in a Platonic realm of mathematics given by the idealized state vector in infinite dimensional Hilbert space.

This coping mechanism is not even coherent. You can’t derive an “ought” statement from a lot of “is” statements. The conclusion can never be stronger than the premises. Similarly, you cannot derive observability by starting from pure mathematics where nothing is observable. Many Worlds has no algebra of observables and it is logically impossible to derive them. You must begin with objects defined in terms of their observables and fit models to their dynamics. You cannot logically start from the Platonic realm of pure mathematics.

It is just a coping mechanism to avoid questioning the completeness of special relativity while also saying you don’t deny objective reality by turning the pure mathematics into objective reality.

If you just admit that a contradiction between special relativity and objective reality means we should call into question the completeness of special relativity, then you can add a little bit of additional structure to it, something called a preferred foliation, and then you suddenly discover that you can fit relativistic quantum mechanics to a realist theory of point particles moving deterministically in 3D space with well defined values at all times independently of the observer.

The theory suddenly becomes intuitive and clear without any mystery, and decoherence was literally discovered through analyzing a realist model of quantum mechanics, because it gives such intuitive clarity of what is going on it finally looks like you are analyzing a coherent physical theory and not an incoherent mess which only has something to say about what shows up on measuring devices.

Einstein didn’t even get a nobel prize for special relativity because it was considered too radical at the time.

He shouldn’t have gotten one for SR specifically anyways because Hendrik Lorentz had already developed a theory that was mathematically equivalent and presented a year prior to Einstein.

The speed of light can be derived from Maxwell’s equations, which is weird to be able to derive a speed just by analyzing how electromagnetism works, because anyone in any reference frame would derive the same speed, which implies the existence of a universal speed. If the speed is universal, what it is universal relative to?

Physicists prior to Einstein believed there might be a universal reference frame which defines absolute time and absolute space, these days called a preferred foliation. The Michelson-Morley experiment was an attempt to measure the existence of this preferred foliation because most theories of how it worked would render it detectable in principle, but found no evidence for it.

Most physicists these days retell this experiment as having debunked the idea and led to its replacement with Einstein’s special relativity. But the truth is more complicated than that, because Lorentz found you could patch the idea by just assuming objects physically contract based on their motion relative to preferred foliation. Lorentz’s theory was presented in 1904, a year before Einstein, and was mathematically equivalent, so it makes all the same predictions, and so anything Einstein’s theory would predict, his theory would’ve also predicted.

The reason Lorentz’s theory fell by the wayside is because, by being able to explain the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment which was meant to detect the preferred foliation, it meant it was no longer detectable, and so people liked Einstein’s theory more that threw out this undetectable aspect. But it would still be weird to give Einstein the Nobel prize for what is ultimately just a simplification of Lorentz’s theory. (Einstein also already received one for something he did deserve anyways.)

But there are also good reasons these days to consider putting the preferred foliation back in and that Lorentz was right. The Friedmann solution to Einstein’s general relativity (the solution associated with the universe we actually live in) spontaneously gives rise to a preferred foliation which is actually empirically observable. You can measure your absolute motion relative to the universe by looking at the cosmic dipole in the cosmic background radiation. Since we know you can measure it now and have actually measured our absolute motion in the universe, the argument against Lorentz’s theory is much weaker.

An even stronger argument, however, comes from quantum mechanics. A famous theorem by the physicist John Bell proves the impossibility of “local realism,” and in this case locality means locality in terms of special relativity, and realism means belief that particles have real states in the real physical world independently of you looking at them (called the ontic states) which explain what shows up on your measurement device when you try to measure them. Since many physicists are committed to the idea of special relativity, they conclude that Bell’s theorem must debunk realism, that objective reality does not exist independently of you looking at it, and devolve into bizarre quantum mysticism and weirdness.

But you can equally interpret this to mean that special relativity is wrong and that the preferred foliation needs to put back in. The physicist Hrvoje Nikolic for example published a paper titled “Relativistic QFT from a Bohmian perspective: A proof of concept” showing that you can fit quantum mechanics to a realist theory that reproduces the predictions of relativistic quantum mechanics if you add back in a preferred foliation.

“Why” implies an underlying ontology. Maybe there is something underneath it but it’s as far as it goes down as far as we currently know. If we don’t at least tentatively accept that our current most fundamental theories are the fundamental ontology of nature, at least as far as we currently know, then we can never believe anything about nature at all, because it would be an infinite regress. Every time we discover a new theory we can ask “well why does it work like that?” and so it would be impossible to actually believe anything about nature.

What is the distinction you are making between knowing the math and understanding it?

There are nonlocal effects in quantum mechanics but I am not sure I would consider quantum teleportation to be one of them. Quantum teleportation may look at first glance to be nonlocal but it can be trivially fit to local hidden variable models, such as Spekkens’ toy model, which makes it at least seem to me to belong in the class of local algorithms.

You have to remember that what is being “transferred” is a statistical description, not something physically tangible, and only observable in a large sample size (an ensemble). Hence, it would be a strange to think that the qubit is like holding a register of its entire quantum state and then that register is disappearing and reappearing on another qubit. The total information in the quantum state only exists in an ensemble.

In an individual run of the experiment, clearly, the joint measurement of 2 bits of information and its transmission over a classical channel is not transmitting the entire quantum state, but the quantum state is not something that exists in an individual run of the experiment anyways. The total information transmitted over an ensemble is much greater can would provide sufficient information to move the statistical description of one of the qubits to another entirely locally.

The complete quantum state is transmitted through the classical channel over the whole ensemble, and not in an individual run of the experiment. Hence, it can be replicated in a local model. It only looks like more than 2 bits of data is moving from one qubit to the other if you treat the quantum state as if it actually is a real physical property of a single qubit, because obviously that is not something that can be specified with 2 bits of information, but an ensemble can indeed encode a continuous distribution.

This is essentially a trivial feature known to any experimentalist, and it needs to be mentioned only because it is stated in many textbooks on quantum mechanics that the wave function is a characteristic of the state of a single particle. If this were so, it would be of interest to perform such a measurement on a single particle (say an electron) which would allow us to determine its own individual wave function. No such measurement is possible.

— Dmitry Blokhintsev

Here’s a trivially simple analogy. We describe a system in a statistical distribution of a single bit with [a; b] where a is the probability of 0 and b is the probability of 1. This is a continuous distribution and thus cannot be specified with just 1 bit of information. But we set up a protocol where I measure this bit and send you the bit’s value, and then you set your own bit to match what you received. The statistics on your bit now will also be guaranteed to be [a; b]. How is it that we transmitted a continuous statistical description that cannot be specified in just 1 bit with only 1 bit of information? Because we didn’t. In every single individual trial, we are always just transmitting 1 single bit. The statistical descriptions refer to an ensemble, and so you have to consider the amount of information actually transmitted over the ensemble.

A qubit’s quantum state has 2 degrees of freedom, as it can it be specified on the Bloch sphere with just an angle and a rotation. The amount of data transmitted over the classical channel is 2 bits. Over an ensemble, those 2 bits would become 2 continuous values, and thus the classical channel over an ensemble contains the exact degrees of freedom needed to describe the complete quantum state of a single qubit.