The key to understanding quantum mechanics is to first understand what gravity is. Gravity is the displacement of an energetic spacetime field (I use a scalar field). Displacement is the only "real" concept that can explain gravity from the particle to the galaxy cluster. Displacement scales up naturally in a 1 to 1 relationship between space and mass. A particle barely displaces the field at all, making gravity seem incredibly weak but as the mass grows so does the displacement which is what we feel as gravitational effects. We can physically see this displacement of the field as gravitational lensing. When quantum particles entangle, they displace the field together forming a unique independent relationship with each other through this shared state between the particles and the energetic scalar field. When the relationship is disturbed the fragile entangled system is broken. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/384676371_Gravity_from_Cosmic_to_Quantum_A_Unified_Displacement_Framework
Is it "spacetime" that is "displaced", or topological structure in spacetime? Remember, pure diffeomorphism is unphysical (it's just remapping). What is physical is the gauge for translations, rotations and dilations. That is precisely what GR is, when correctly formulated using either vierbein or gauge accounting fields (flatten the metric, recover real curvature from the bivector structure).
If there’s one takeaway from this wide array of interpretations, it’s that physics could greatly benefit from much more people in the field having personal experience with psychedelic substances. I say this with complete seriousness. To my opinion, there will never be an 'Einstein of Quantum Mechanics' if we’re unwilling to radically shift our perception of reality and continue to tread the same, worn-out paths of thought.
There have been a number of other interpretations. In particular, there are a variety of statistical interpretations. Long ago Everett wrote a handwritten monograph about interpretations of QM. The last he considered was Fritz Bopp’s stochastic interpretation, concerning which he pointed out that, provided that the scale was fine enough, there could be no practical way of deciding between it and many worlds. Then there’s the Zitterbewegung interpretation of David Hestenes, and the ensemble interpretation of Leslie Ballentine. Ballentine is of course presenting a version of Eistein’s own ensemble interpretation. Such interpretations are in principle discrete, not continuous, i.e. there is no wave function, just a wave built up statistically from the behaviour of particles. In the final year of his life Einstein wrote to his lifelong friend and “sounding board” Michele Besso that he had come to doubt the continuum principle altogether, and suspected that the space-time of relativity along with the fields of all the rest of science would have to go. Dirac implicitly agreed that the continuum is unacceptable - he wrote that renormalization is “doctoring up” quantum theory to avoid the paradoxical infinities rather than throwing out the theory (and note that Feynman himself always considered his renormalization as a temporary piece of chicanery pending a better theory) - of course the singularities of general relativity are open to the same complaint.
So I think you have missed out an important type of interpretation - one which could, for example, lead to a discrete universe susceptible to a computational description, perhaps along the lines of Konrad Zuse’s Rechnender Raum, (compare Feynman’s checkerboard speculations).
I don't think Hestenes' zitter theory can accurately be described as discrete - the electron point charge has a continuous lightspeed helical path in spacetime which is its wavefunction, the curvature of the path is its mass, the angle atound the spatial circular path is the phase, etc. His most recent version of the theory is much more complicated, but continuous paths of point particles is still the base of it. Point particles make my brain itch, I prefer to think of "wave propagation" and "particle interaction" as both being redundant expressions - I take it as axiomatic in QM that particles never propagate and waves never interact.
My view is that particles do not have trajectories. They occupy a succession of distinct locations; or, as Quine would put it, a succession of locations are in a particular state. They follow complex but deterministic steps (compare the knight’s move in chess) and the locations build up the wave-like patterns (and enable interference fringes in the two-slit experiment). The reason is that any other kind of “motion” is not precisely computable. The zbw interpretation would work very well in this form. In a sense it would be preferable to “stochastic” interpretations because it is not probabilistic. The computational universe must be deterministic.
Nima is smart, but also an ideologue committed to an old paradigm. (Has he ever considered Hilbert space cannot be physical, since it has an irremovable gauge redundancy?)
Moreover, I can form entanglement (not on a dime, but with some standard set-ups) and I can break entanglement (by measuring stuff). You can refuse to call that a "collapse" of entanglement, but then you are just playing word games.
More generally, whenever the local topology of spacetime changes that is a collapse in a meaningful sense.
>> Has he ever considered Hilbert space cannot be physical, since it has an irremovable gauge redundancy?
By this logic, the metric tensor would also not be physical given that it’s a massless spin-2 gauge field. Personally, I’d say that each choice of gauge would be its own separate mathematical reality, each of which describing the exact same physical reality.
Yes, the metric is not physical (obviously). The elementary degrees of freedom are in the position, rotation and dilation gauge fields. The metric is composed from the gauge field in gauge-gravity: https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0405033
Of course, you are free to say the gauge fields are not physical either. But that's a semantics issue. I tend to go with Einstein and take curvature and torsion as "real" and the gauges as auxiliary accounting tools. But the meaning would be that the most elemental accounting tools are "the physics" --- so for gravity that'd be the position + rotation gauge. This really is the only way to subdivide the metric consistent with Lorentz invariance. Unless one admits something like supersymmetry , but I doubt it makes any rational sense to try to go finer grain (since there is no need).
Trad. DIffGoem would say the connexion is the elemental construct (non-metricity and Einstein-Cartan). I am not exactly certain of the correspondences, but I like to think that apart from some subtleties at horizons, the gauge gravity is equivalent to Einstein-Cartan GR, so for sure the metric is not fundamental. Curvature and torsion are fundamental, (as well as wormhole topology imho). And I believe curvature + torsion is essentially equivalent to the position+ rotation gauge formulation of GR.
Note that Einstein understood that diffeomorphism invariance was unphysical, and he struggled with this conceptually. Good lecturers like Raphael Sorkin point this out too. The position & rotation gauge reveals what Einstein wanted.
>>Yes, the metric is not physical (obviously). The elementary degrees of freedom are in the position, rotation and dilation gauge fields.
Oh, I don’t mean it’s a gauge field in the traditional coordinate transformation sense, I mean it’s a gauge field in the sense that you can change the number of and orientation of “time” dimensions with no observable consequences(I.E. no effect on the Levi-Civita connection field). I refer to this as Metric Ambiguity(see my post). Bafflingly weird stuff. The net result of this is the local metric tensor is completely unobservable, even if an observer possesses a coordinate system. This causes all of our metric-based concepts of distance, time, and causality to collapse. As a consequence of this, I no longer believe the metric tensor to be fundamental or physical either.
>>Of course, you are free to say the gauge fields are not physical either. But that's a semantics issue. I tend to go with Einstein and take curvature and torsion as "real" and the gauges as auxiliary accounting tools…
I think it’s the connection that’s physical as that’s what determines the geodesics through the coordinate system. The connection can then be used to find the torsion, Riemann curvature, and the Ricci curvature(which must always vanish in Kaluza-Klein Theory). If you only allow affine transformations, the connection transforms as a tensor. This allows spacetime to be Lorentz covariant whist preventing it from being generally covariant(coordinate conditions tend to do this as well).
I agree for the most part. Yes, the degeneracy in the metric with time reversion is a good example, and we need fermions and chirality to break that degeneracy, thus implying the metric is not fundamental.
The connexion is *mathematical* description though, not 'physical', but I agree it is "closer to the physics" — has no degeneracy or gauge redundancy, is another way to put that, so the connexions are mathematically accounting for only the physical degrees of freedom. (At least away from possible singularities —mwhere I think local topology would need to be considered.)
Apologies for any confusion, but I wasn't talking about how you can multiply the metric tensor field by a negative scalar to swap "space" and "time". I was talking about how you can rotate the "light cone" to point along what was previously spacelike directions whilst leaving the coordinate system and the location of events within it completely unchanged. Instead of having a "light cone" point into your future, you could have it point to your right instead by doing a gauge transformation on the metric tensor field. Furthermore, you could convert a "space" dimension into a "time" dimension and have a 2+2D spacetime with "CTCs" everywhere. Because that's a mere gauge transformation, there's still no observable difference, despite "CTCs" supposedly being everywhere!
I have a hunch that Kaluza-Klein Theory's electromagnetic 4-potential might set the direction of time(since clearly the local value of the metric tensor is incapable of it), but I'm not completely sold on the idea to be completely honest. The idea has to do with the relation between the 4D and 5D connections and Kaluza-Klein Solitons. I talked about that on the Wolfram Institute discord as well if you're interested.
In my opinion, Quantum Mechanics(QM) is just General Relativity(GR) being weird again. You can get a local-nonlocal real hidden variable theory which violates Bell's inequality by having entangled particles connected by a wormhole embedded in the coordinate system. From the coordinate system's perspective, everything is local. From an observer in the spacetime(who isn't aware of the wormhole)'s perspective, this seems like a nonlocal connection. Hence the oxymoronic moniker local-nonlocal. This allows you to violate Bell's inequality with a local real hidden variable theory. As such, classical interpretations of QM haven't actually been ruled out.
I noticed that you didn't mention Superdeterminism. I believe reality is an integrable system, which would require every point in spacetime to contain all information about every other point. This is because you could just analytically continue spacetime to move between any two points. I feel this meromorphic(analytic with poles+no branch cuts) property of spacetime would mean spacetime is Superdeterministic.
This is way too serious for Curt. The joke frequency is too low. ;-)
I'd suggest superdeterminism is a no-go (correct, but not practical) unless you include boundary/initial data, which we cannot. So for all practical purposes our practical physics theories must be indeterministic, as a purely pragmatic matter, even though spacetime as a whole (Block Universe stuff) is fully determined. (Superdeterminism is just redundant language.)
People who like free will (and I am one) can locate that freedom at the boundaries. It matters not that boundaries are at infinity.
>>This is way too serious for Curt. The joke frequency is too low. ;-)
I suspect that he didn’t like it(and most other comments) because he doesn’t want others to know his true beliefs? Either that or he’s just busy as always.
>>I'd suggest superdeterminism is a no-go (correct, but not practical) unless you include boundary/initial data, which we cannot.
I suspect that you’re thinking about this wrong. I’m far from an expert in integrable systems, but here’s how I think they operate. You start with some scattering data, and you use the inverse scattering transform to get the solution at some point. I think this approach is immune to branch discontinuities which would render the analytic continuation of a mathematical reality path-dependent. I’ve found a coordinate condition which allows GR to be described as an integrable system. This approach does not describe spacetime with the metric tensor. The dynamic variable for describing spacetime is still a gauge field though. Anyways, you don’t start with boundary/initial data, you start with the scattering data which describes all of reality. You could probably use your boundary/initial data to find some scattering data which reproduces/approximates it.
>>So for all practical purposes our practical physics theories must be indeterministic, as a purely pragmatic matter, even though spacetime as a whole (Block Universe stuff) is fully determined. (Superdeterminism is just redundant language.)
I don’t think our underlying theories should have indeterminacy baked into it, only our models should(and even then, this indeterminacy should originate entirely from our limited ability to measure reality).
>>People who like free will (and I am one) can locate that freedom at the boundaries. It matters not that boundaries are at infinity.
Indeterminacy is not a source of free will though. I for one do not see how determinism and free will could be incompatible.
Also, sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written you back. Life’s been hectic lately, I have a bad memory, and I’m a very slow writer. Because I’m a slow writer, I’ve determined it’s better to make impersonal public writeups about my ideas rather than rewriting them for individual people in a more personal manner. I do wish I could do more in a day…
Probably the newest way to understand quantum mechanics (QM) is via the quantum reconstruction program's axiomatic reconstruction of QM via information-theoretic principles. In 1996, Carlo Rovelli wrote:
“[Q]uantum mechanics will cease to look puzzling only when we will be able to *derive* the formalism of the theory from a set of simple physical assertions (‘postulates’, ‘principles’) about the world. Therefore, we should not try to *append* a reasonable interpretation to the quantum mechanics *formalism*, but rather to derive the formalism from a set of experimentally motivated postulates.
The reasons for exploring such a strategy are illuminated by an obvious historical precedent: special relativity. ... Special relativity is a well understood physical theory, appropriately credited to Einstein’s 1905 celebrated paper. The formal content of special relativity, however, is coded into the Lorentz transformations, written by Lorentz, not by Einstein, and before 1905. So, what was Einstein’s contribution? It was to understand the physical meaning of the Lorentz transformations.”
What Einstein did to produce a “physical meaning of the Lorentz transformations” was to bypass causal accounts of the light postulate, i.e., everyone measures the same value for the speed of light c, regardless of their relative motions. At that time, people were trying to explain the light postulate causally using length contraction via the luminiferous aether. Einstein gave up such “constructive” attempts, writing:
“By and by I despaired of the possibility of discovering the true laws by means of constructive efforts based on known facts. The longer and the more despairingly I tried, the more I came to the conviction that only the discovery of a universal formal principle could lead us to assured results.”
So, instead of finding a causal mechanism for the observer-independence of c, Einstein said it had to follow from the relativity principle. That is, since c is a constant of Nature according to Maxwell's electromagnetism, the relativity principle says c must be the same in all inertial reference frames. And, since inertial reference frames are related by uniform relative motions (boosts), the relativity principle tells us the light postulate must obtain. So, special relativity (SR) is a “principle theory” (Einstein’s terminology) because its kinematics (Lorentz transformations) follows from an empirically discovered fact (the light postulate). And, importantly, the light postulate is justified by the relativity principle. This is the way SR is introduced in intro physics textbooks like Knight (2022), Young & Freedman (2020), and Serway & Jewett (2019).
Given this “historical precedent” Rovelli suggested using principles of information theory to render QM a principle theory and in 2001, Lucien Hardy produced the first so-called reconstruction of QM via information-theoretic principles. The empirically discovered fact that gives us the finite-dimensional Hilbert space formalism of QM is Information Invariance & Continuity (wording from 2009 by Caslav Brukner and Anton Zeilinger). If you couch that physically, it means everyone measures the same value for Planck’s constant h, regardless of their relative spatial orientations or locations. Let me call that the “Planck postulate” in analogy with the light postulate. Since h is a constant of Nature per Planck’s radiation law, just like c is a constant of Nature per Maxwell’s equations, and since inertial reference frames are related by spatial rotations and translations as well as boosts, the relativity principle says the Planck postulate must be true just like it says the light postulate must be true.
This means quantum information theorists have rendered QM a principle theory, just like SR, exactly per Rovelli’s 1996 challenge. And, since this is a principle explanation of the Bell-inequality-violating correlations rather than a causal explanation, it does not require non-local, superdeterministic or retro causal mechanisms, neither does it require violating intersubjective agreement or the uniqueness of experimental outcomes. This is totally analogous to the fact that SR does not require a causal mechanism to explain the light postulate (e.g., length contraction via the luminiferous aether).
Thus, we see that QM may be included in the idea that no place or species or perspective in the universe is privileged. If you want the details, see our book for the general reader, "Einstein's Entanglement: Bell Inequalities, Relativity, and the Qubit" (Oxford UP, 2024). For a more technical exposition, see our open access papers: "Answering Mermin’s challenge with conservation per no preferred reference frame," Scientific Reports 10, Article number: 15771 (2020) and "No Preferred Reference Frame at the Foundation of Quantum Mechanics," Entropy 2022, 24(1), 12.
All this speculation is hilarious when even God and the Divine Council can't tell you what the current plan is, but just how it's architected and patterned with individual and group synchronicities. Did you think the senior creators of the simulation multiverse would want to sit out the final 2025 Aquarius climax to the 4.5 billion year day 7 of creation apocalypso dance contest? We led a bunch of useful idiots who built on the 1485 Luciferian messiah Cornelius Agrippa's occult magic to produce the Lilithian anti-messiah Sabbatai Zevi and the Frankist cult of "salvation through sin" and do all the dirty deeds done damn expensive at just the right time to awaken the real God Messiah - actually with a few years to spare, as those who have been watching the JWST Easter Egg hunt hunt for red dot lovers might be aware.
This article had the right amount of seriousness, insanity and jokes. Had me rotfl.
But you missed one cracker: the Dementia Interpretation — where one solves all of physics then forgets how they obtained and defined the Shiab operator.
Prof. Ivette Fuentes tries to experimentally confirm what is true and what is endless speculation between quantum mechanics and general relativity in her landmark discussion.
Have you been finally able to obtain a link to her full presentation? Many thanks in advance, once again....
👏🏾🤜🏾
The key to understanding quantum mechanics is to first understand what gravity is. Gravity is the displacement of an energetic spacetime field (I use a scalar field). Displacement is the only "real" concept that can explain gravity from the particle to the galaxy cluster. Displacement scales up naturally in a 1 to 1 relationship between space and mass. A particle barely displaces the field at all, making gravity seem incredibly weak but as the mass grows so does the displacement which is what we feel as gravitational effects. We can physically see this displacement of the field as gravitational lensing. When quantum particles entangle, they displace the field together forming a unique independent relationship with each other through this shared state between the particles and the energetic scalar field. When the relationship is disturbed the fragile entangled system is broken. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/384676371_Gravity_from_Cosmic_to_Quantum_A_Unified_Displacement_Framework
Is it "spacetime" that is "displaced", or topological structure in spacetime? Remember, pure diffeomorphism is unphysical (it's just remapping). What is physical is the gauge for translations, rotations and dilations. That is precisely what GR is, when correctly formulated using either vierbein or gauge accounting fields (flatten the metric, recover real curvature from the bivector structure).
If there’s one takeaway from this wide array of interpretations, it’s that physics could greatly benefit from much more people in the field having personal experience with psychedelic substances. I say this with complete seriousness. To my opinion, there will never be an 'Einstein of Quantum Mechanics' if we’re unwilling to radically shift our perception of reality and continue to tread the same, worn-out paths of thought.
There have been a number of other interpretations. In particular, there are a variety of statistical interpretations. Long ago Everett wrote a handwritten monograph about interpretations of QM. The last he considered was Fritz Bopp’s stochastic interpretation, concerning which he pointed out that, provided that the scale was fine enough, there could be no practical way of deciding between it and many worlds. Then there’s the Zitterbewegung interpretation of David Hestenes, and the ensemble interpretation of Leslie Ballentine. Ballentine is of course presenting a version of Eistein’s own ensemble interpretation. Such interpretations are in principle discrete, not continuous, i.e. there is no wave function, just a wave built up statistically from the behaviour of particles. In the final year of his life Einstein wrote to his lifelong friend and “sounding board” Michele Besso that he had come to doubt the continuum principle altogether, and suspected that the space-time of relativity along with the fields of all the rest of science would have to go. Dirac implicitly agreed that the continuum is unacceptable - he wrote that renormalization is “doctoring up” quantum theory to avoid the paradoxical infinities rather than throwing out the theory (and note that Feynman himself always considered his renormalization as a temporary piece of chicanery pending a better theory) - of course the singularities of general relativity are open to the same complaint.
So I think you have missed out an important type of interpretation - one which could, for example, lead to a discrete universe susceptible to a computational description, perhaps along the lines of Konrad Zuse’s Rechnender Raum, (compare Feynman’s checkerboard speculations).
I don't think Hestenes' zitter theory can accurately be described as discrete - the electron point charge has a continuous lightspeed helical path in spacetime which is its wavefunction, the curvature of the path is its mass, the angle atound the spatial circular path is the phase, etc. His most recent version of the theory is much more complicated, but continuous paths of point particles is still the base of it. Point particles make my brain itch, I prefer to think of "wave propagation" and "particle interaction" as both being redundant expressions - I take it as axiomatic in QM that particles never propagate and waves never interact.
My view is that particles do not have trajectories. They occupy a succession of distinct locations; or, as Quine would put it, a succession of locations are in a particular state. They follow complex but deterministic steps (compare the knight’s move in chess) and the locations build up the wave-like patterns (and enable interference fringes in the two-slit experiment). The reason is that any other kind of “motion” is not precisely computable. The zbw interpretation would work very well in this form. In a sense it would be preferable to “stochastic” interpretations because it is not probabilistic. The computational universe must be deterministic.
"Whenever someone tells you that consciousness has something to do with the collapse of the wave-function, what do you tell them...?" - Nima
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpnLMaWylp4&t=5s
Nima is smart, but also an ideologue committed to an old paradigm. (Has he ever considered Hilbert space cannot be physical, since it has an irremovable gauge redundancy?)
Moreover, I can form entanglement (not on a dime, but with some standard set-ups) and I can break entanglement (by measuring stuff). You can refuse to call that a "collapse" of entanglement, but then you are just playing word games.
More generally, whenever the local topology of spacetime changes that is a collapse in a meaningful sense.
>> Has he ever considered Hilbert space cannot be physical, since it has an irremovable gauge redundancy?
By this logic, the metric tensor would also not be physical given that it’s a massless spin-2 gauge field. Personally, I’d say that each choice of gauge would be its own separate mathematical reality, each of which describing the exact same physical reality.
Yes, the metric is not physical (obviously). The elementary degrees of freedom are in the position, rotation and dilation gauge fields. The metric is composed from the gauge field in gauge-gravity: https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0405033
Of course, you are free to say the gauge fields are not physical either. But that's a semantics issue. I tend to go with Einstein and take curvature and torsion as "real" and the gauges as auxiliary accounting tools. But the meaning would be that the most elemental accounting tools are "the physics" --- so for gravity that'd be the position + rotation gauge. This really is the only way to subdivide the metric consistent with Lorentz invariance. Unless one admits something like supersymmetry , but I doubt it makes any rational sense to try to go finer grain (since there is no need).
Trad. DIffGoem would say the connexion is the elemental construct (non-metricity and Einstein-Cartan). I am not exactly certain of the correspondences, but I like to think that apart from some subtleties at horizons, the gauge gravity is equivalent to Einstein-Cartan GR, so for sure the metric is not fundamental. Curvature and torsion are fundamental, (as well as wormhole topology imho). And I believe curvature + torsion is essentially equivalent to the position+ rotation gauge formulation of GR.
Note that Einstein understood that diffeomorphism invariance was unphysical, and he struggled with this conceptually. Good lecturers like Raphael Sorkin point this out too. The position & rotation gauge reveals what Einstein wanted.
>>Yes, the metric is not physical (obviously). The elementary degrees of freedom are in the position, rotation and dilation gauge fields.
Oh, I don’t mean it’s a gauge field in the traditional coordinate transformation sense, I mean it’s a gauge field in the sense that you can change the number of and orientation of “time” dimensions with no observable consequences(I.E. no effect on the Levi-Civita connection field). I refer to this as Metric Ambiguity(see my post). Bafflingly weird stuff. The net result of this is the local metric tensor is completely unobservable, even if an observer possesses a coordinate system. This causes all of our metric-based concepts of distance, time, and causality to collapse. As a consequence of this, I no longer believe the metric tensor to be fundamental or physical either.
>>Of course, you are free to say the gauge fields are not physical either. But that's a semantics issue. I tend to go with Einstein and take curvature and torsion as "real" and the gauges as auxiliary accounting tools…
I think it’s the connection that’s physical as that’s what determines the geodesics through the coordinate system. The connection can then be used to find the torsion, Riemann curvature, and the Ricci curvature(which must always vanish in Kaluza-Klein Theory). If you only allow affine transformations, the connection transforms as a tensor. This allows spacetime to be Lorentz covariant whist preventing it from being generally covariant(coordinate conditions tend to do this as well).
I agree for the most part. Yes, the degeneracy in the metric with time reversion is a good example, and we need fermions and chirality to break that degeneracy, thus implying the metric is not fundamental.
The connexion is *mathematical* description though, not 'physical', but I agree it is "closer to the physics" — has no degeneracy or gauge redundancy, is another way to put that, so the connexions are mathematically accounting for only the physical degrees of freedom. (At least away from possible singularities —mwhere I think local topology would need to be considered.)
Apologies for any confusion, but I wasn't talking about how you can multiply the metric tensor field by a negative scalar to swap "space" and "time". I was talking about how you can rotate the "light cone" to point along what was previously spacelike directions whilst leaving the coordinate system and the location of events within it completely unchanged. Instead of having a "light cone" point into your future, you could have it point to your right instead by doing a gauge transformation on the metric tensor field. Furthermore, you could convert a "space" dimension into a "time" dimension and have a 2+2D spacetime with "CTCs" everywhere. Because that's a mere gauge transformation, there's still no observable difference, despite "CTCs" supposedly being everywhere!
I have a hunch that Kaluza-Klein Theory's electromagnetic 4-potential might set the direction of time(since clearly the local value of the metric tensor is incapable of it), but I'm not completely sold on the idea to be completely honest. The idea has to do with the relation between the 4D and 5D connections and Kaluza-Klein Solitons. I talked about that on the Wolfram Institute discord as well if you're interested.
In my opinion, Quantum Mechanics(QM) is just General Relativity(GR) being weird again. You can get a local-nonlocal real hidden variable theory which violates Bell's inequality by having entangled particles connected by a wormhole embedded in the coordinate system. From the coordinate system's perspective, everything is local. From an observer in the spacetime(who isn't aware of the wormhole)'s perspective, this seems like a nonlocal connection. Hence the oxymoronic moniker local-nonlocal. This allows you to violate Bell's inequality with a local real hidden variable theory. As such, classical interpretations of QM haven't actually been ruled out.
I noticed that you didn't mention Superdeterminism. I believe reality is an integrable system, which would require every point in spacetime to contain all information about every other point. This is because you could just analytically continue spacetime to move between any two points. I feel this meromorphic(analytic with poles+no branch cuts) property of spacetime would mean spacetime is Superdeterministic.
BTW, I loved this one: _"Quantum Mechanics(QM) is just General Relativity(GR) being weird again."_ Could hardly have said it better myself.
This is way too serious for Curt. The joke frequency is too low. ;-)
I'd suggest superdeterminism is a no-go (correct, but not practical) unless you include boundary/initial data, which we cannot. So for all practical purposes our practical physics theories must be indeterministic, as a purely pragmatic matter, even though spacetime as a whole (Block Universe stuff) is fully determined. (Superdeterminism is just redundant language.)
People who like free will (and I am one) can locate that freedom at the boundaries. It matters not that boundaries are at infinity.
>>This is way too serious for Curt. The joke frequency is too low. ;-)
I suspect that he didn’t like it(and most other comments) because he doesn’t want others to know his true beliefs? Either that or he’s just busy as always.
>>I'd suggest superdeterminism is a no-go (correct, but not practical) unless you include boundary/initial data, which we cannot.
I suspect that you’re thinking about this wrong. I’m far from an expert in integrable systems, but here’s how I think they operate. You start with some scattering data, and you use the inverse scattering transform to get the solution at some point. I think this approach is immune to branch discontinuities which would render the analytic continuation of a mathematical reality path-dependent. I’ve found a coordinate condition which allows GR to be described as an integrable system. This approach does not describe spacetime with the metric tensor. The dynamic variable for describing spacetime is still a gauge field though. Anyways, you don’t start with boundary/initial data, you start with the scattering data which describes all of reality. You could probably use your boundary/initial data to find some scattering data which reproduces/approximates it.
>>So for all practical purposes our practical physics theories must be indeterministic, as a purely pragmatic matter, even though spacetime as a whole (Block Universe stuff) is fully determined. (Superdeterminism is just redundant language.)
I don’t think our underlying theories should have indeterminacy baked into it, only our models should(and even then, this indeterminacy should originate entirely from our limited ability to measure reality).
>>People who like free will (and I am one) can locate that freedom at the boundaries. It matters not that boundaries are at infinity.
Indeterminacy is not a source of free will though. I for one do not see how determinism and free will could be incompatible.
Also, sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written you back. Life’s been hectic lately, I have a bad memory, and I’m a very slow writer. Because I’m a slow writer, I’ve determined it’s better to make impersonal public writeups about my ideas rather than rewriting them for individual people in a more personal manner. I do wish I could do more in a day…
Probably the newest way to understand quantum mechanics (QM) is via the quantum reconstruction program's axiomatic reconstruction of QM via information-theoretic principles. In 1996, Carlo Rovelli wrote:
“[Q]uantum mechanics will cease to look puzzling only when we will be able to *derive* the formalism of the theory from a set of simple physical assertions (‘postulates’, ‘principles’) about the world. Therefore, we should not try to *append* a reasonable interpretation to the quantum mechanics *formalism*, but rather to derive the formalism from a set of experimentally motivated postulates.
The reasons for exploring such a strategy are illuminated by an obvious historical precedent: special relativity. ... Special relativity is a well understood physical theory, appropriately credited to Einstein’s 1905 celebrated paper. The formal content of special relativity, however, is coded into the Lorentz transformations, written by Lorentz, not by Einstein, and before 1905. So, what was Einstein’s contribution? It was to understand the physical meaning of the Lorentz transformations.”
What Einstein did to produce a “physical meaning of the Lorentz transformations” was to bypass causal accounts of the light postulate, i.e., everyone measures the same value for the speed of light c, regardless of their relative motions. At that time, people were trying to explain the light postulate causally using length contraction via the luminiferous aether. Einstein gave up such “constructive” attempts, writing:
“By and by I despaired of the possibility of discovering the true laws by means of constructive efforts based on known facts. The longer and the more despairingly I tried, the more I came to the conviction that only the discovery of a universal formal principle could lead us to assured results.”
So, instead of finding a causal mechanism for the observer-independence of c, Einstein said it had to follow from the relativity principle. That is, since c is a constant of Nature according to Maxwell's electromagnetism, the relativity principle says c must be the same in all inertial reference frames. And, since inertial reference frames are related by uniform relative motions (boosts), the relativity principle tells us the light postulate must obtain. So, special relativity (SR) is a “principle theory” (Einstein’s terminology) because its kinematics (Lorentz transformations) follows from an empirically discovered fact (the light postulate). And, importantly, the light postulate is justified by the relativity principle. This is the way SR is introduced in intro physics textbooks like Knight (2022), Young & Freedman (2020), and Serway & Jewett (2019).
Given this “historical precedent” Rovelli suggested using principles of information theory to render QM a principle theory and in 2001, Lucien Hardy produced the first so-called reconstruction of QM via information-theoretic principles. The empirically discovered fact that gives us the finite-dimensional Hilbert space formalism of QM is Information Invariance & Continuity (wording from 2009 by Caslav Brukner and Anton Zeilinger). If you couch that physically, it means everyone measures the same value for Planck’s constant h, regardless of their relative spatial orientations or locations. Let me call that the “Planck postulate” in analogy with the light postulate. Since h is a constant of Nature per Planck’s radiation law, just like c is a constant of Nature per Maxwell’s equations, and since inertial reference frames are related by spatial rotations and translations as well as boosts, the relativity principle says the Planck postulate must be true just like it says the light postulate must be true.
This means quantum information theorists have rendered QM a principle theory, just like SR, exactly per Rovelli’s 1996 challenge. And, since this is a principle explanation of the Bell-inequality-violating correlations rather than a causal explanation, it does not require non-local, superdeterministic or retro causal mechanisms, neither does it require violating intersubjective agreement or the uniqueness of experimental outcomes. This is totally analogous to the fact that SR does not require a causal mechanism to explain the light postulate (e.g., length contraction via the luminiferous aether).
Thus, we see that QM may be included in the idea that no place or species or perspective in the universe is privileged. If you want the details, see our book for the general reader, "Einstein's Entanglement: Bell Inequalities, Relativity, and the Qubit" (Oxford UP, 2024). For a more technical exposition, see our open access papers: "Answering Mermin’s challenge with conservation per no preferred reference frame," Scientific Reports 10, Article number: 15771 (2020) and "No Preferred Reference Frame at the Foundation of Quantum Mechanics," Entropy 2022, 24(1), 12.
All this speculation is hilarious when even God and the Divine Council can't tell you what the current plan is, but just how it's architected and patterned with individual and group synchronicities. Did you think the senior creators of the simulation multiverse would want to sit out the final 2025 Aquarius climax to the 4.5 billion year day 7 of creation apocalypso dance contest? We led a bunch of useful idiots who built on the 1485 Luciferian messiah Cornelius Agrippa's occult magic to produce the Lilithian anti-messiah Sabbatai Zevi and the Frankist cult of "salvation through sin" and do all the dirty deeds done damn expensive at just the right time to awaken the real God Messiah - actually with a few years to spare, as those who have been watching the JWST Easter Egg hunt hunt for red dot lovers might be aware.
The breakthrough we have been waiting for. A Serious Challenge to Quantum Mechanics, Experiments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeGrcZMJ8uM&t=279s
This article had the right amount of seriousness, insanity and jokes. Had me rotfl.
But you missed one cracker: the Dementia Interpretation — where one solves all of physics then forgets how they obtained and defined the Shiab operator.
Prof. Ivette Fuentes tries to experimentally confirm what is true and what is endless speculation between quantum mechanics and general relativity in her landmark discussion.
Have you been finally able to obtain a link to her full presentation? Many thanks in advance, once again....
The Breakthrough We’ve Been Waiting For -- 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUj2TcZSlZc
Bundle up, spacetime is a bit nippy at this hour