why is superdeterminism not the universally accepted explanation of nonlocality?

jadrian

reason is capable of intuitively understanding our universe in my opinion, and einsteins. i dont draw pictures of what i think the world should look like, but im also not like a lab rat who gets a false reading and takes a swing at einstein only to get their arm torn off.

jadrian

i get it, people psychologically cant function or live happily with the idea that everything they do is already predetermined. all ill say is most of my life i believed in free will, but all you have to do is think very deeply and ask yourself, how could you have possibly done anything different than the way you did it?

lugita15

No, there isn't, but there is something conspiratorial about a particle behaving in just the right way based on the information it has about what other particles are going to do at just the right time and place. Again, particles interacting and transferring information is not regarded as a conspiracy. It's a conspiracy if their interaction induced some very special behavior on their part which leads to a Bell-type nonlocal correlation.

Joncon

Einsten told us that the speed of light would be measured the same regardless of how fast we were travelling. Is that intuitive? His theories also tell us that a spaceman who travels around the galaxy for a while and returns to Earth will be younger than his twin. That's certainly not intuitive either. Our intuition has evolved to help us in everyday life, and it works well, but on an atomic scale it's obviously lacking.

I'm not sure there are too many scientists who believe in free will (maybe I'm wrong), but you don't need superdeterminism to rule it out. As long as you accept that certain things in the universe happen randomly then the future isn't already mapped out. It doesn't mean you have any more "control" over your actions, just that you can't predict them.

jadrian

[QUOTE=lugita15;3785784]No, there isn't, but there is something conspiratorial about a particle behaving in just the right way/QUOTE]

you said a and d were correlated. saying "just the right way" implies more than correlation in my mind

lugita15

To repeat, in order to have Bell-type nonlocal correlations between A and D in a local deterministic theory, we need A and D not only to have interacted in the past, but to have interacted in just the right way so that they would get the right "conspiratorial" initial conditions so that they would display the right kind of nonlocal correlations years later.

jadrian

you say "is that intuitive?" intuition isnt the same for all. in fact it is relative lol no pun intended. einsteins thoughts that the speed of light is the same for all observers and the spaceman traveling at high speed will age slower and that space and time were inseparable WERE INTUITIVE to him.

f=ma is not intuitive to a retarded person.

you might ask if we would arrived at relativity today without einsteins intuition.

my guess is yes but its possible we might still not have come to relativity without einstein.

either way, einstein proves how far iq and intuition can take you.

lugita15

Off topic, but Einstein definitely did not find the new radical notions of space and time he came up with intuitive. He was led to SR because he saw that the electrodynamics of moving bodies seemed to possess a greater degree of symmetry than their conventional description gave them credit for, and so he tried to redo the laws of kinematics so that Maxwell's equations could be shown to conform with the principle of relativity.

jadrian

another example, is it intuitive that we are indistingushable from nonliving chemical processes, leading to the conclusion that either we must either regard all chemical reactions as living, or that we are not alive in the traditional sense. i came to this conclusion through my intuition, and simply thinking about it. while kiths intuition apparently was not adequate, i think this conclusion i came to should be intuitive to anybody.

ThomasT

There's no way to know or demonstrate that information, or anything else, is instantaneously transferred from a to b. In fact, instantaneous propagation is a contradiction in terms. If a and b are changing instantaneously, then they're changing simultaneously. And there's nothing in our observations of our world, our universe, that suggests that simultaneous, spacelike separated, changes in a and b imply a causal relationship, or any sort of communication, between a and b. Rather, what this does imply is that a and b are part of a larger system, or that a and b have something in common due to a common cause.

Wrt some formulations (eg., inferred wrt standard QM and explicit wrt dBB interpretation) a and b can be said to change, or are explicitly encoded as changing, simultaneously. So, if one wants to give this some sort of pseudo mechanical meaning, then one might say that information is being instantaneously transferred between a and b. But this isn't really mechanics. It's just an assumption that can't be verified or falsified. Ie., a physically meaningless statement.

That's news to me. I would say that observations indicate that our universe behaves contrary to the notion of block time. That is, it's evolving and transitory. But that certain theoretical constructs/eventualities suggest block time. And, afaik, the theoretical stuff that suggests block time (or that contradicts observation) is more or less routinely disregarded/discarded.

Because it's unwarranted wrt extant observation and mainstream interpretation of theory.

Your title asks why superdeterminsim isn't universally accepted. My guess is that it's because superdeterminism doesn't refer to anything other than determinism. Determinism might not be universally accepted, but I think it's the predominant assumption and starting point wrt virtually all of the physical sciences.

Why not? Are you saying that the assumption of determinism implies action at a distance? Or superluminal propagations?

Ok. So far this is just determinism.

You've arbitrarily assumed a starting point (ie., initial conditions) that isn't influenced by past events. But we can just as well assume that wrt whatever you want to assume as a starting point there are antecedent events, ie., some prior history/conditions.

So, as far as I can tell, superdeterminism is a superfluous term, which actually just refers to determinism.

lugita15

ThomasT, a while back I told you what distinguishes superdeterminism from regular determinism, as well as what time t=0 is:
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=3523407

ThomasT

Yes, I reread your reply. I still don't understand what differentiates superdeterminism from determinism. I think Demystifier also tried to explain it one time to me. That didn't do it for me either. Or what Bell or 't Hooft have to say about it. I mean, it just isn't clear to me what the word superdeterminism refers to that's different from what the word determinism refers to.

lugita15

Superdeterminism equals determinism plus conspiracy. If you take an arbitrary local realist theory with arbitrary initial conditions, it will satisfy Bell's inequality, meaning that it will not display the Bell-type nonlocal correlations necessary to reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics. In contrast, in a local superdeterministic theory you make all the particles in the universe have some big meeting some time in the past, where they all set the initial states of their hidden variables just right, so that they can all work together in an elaborate conspiracy to make sure that every Bell test performed in the history of the universe will make Bell's inequality appear violated even though it really isn't. In other words, you're making it seems as if local determinism is false even though it is really true. On the other hand, an ordinary local realist theory will easily produce predictions which disagree with quantum mechanics.

DrChinese

Yes, and to drive home to jadrian a point I keep making: A and D could NEVER have interacted in the past because they NEVER existed in a common light cone. They were "born" too far apart! So now you have to modify the physics so that the lasers that created them (which are pulse matched) must contain the information needed to yield the correlations. But that means it is the pulse that does this (since other lasers won't be able to do this). The pulse doesn't contain enough information to cause that to happen. So now you need even more ad hoc hypotheses to make it all work out.

And this is just one setup.

ThomasT

I'm not sure what you mean by "arbitrary initial conditions". An experimental preparation designed to produce entanglement stats isn't "arbitrary", is it?

Hmmm. Well, this just seems silly to me. No offense. Maybe you can elaborate on this, explain what you're talking about, in a way that doesn't seem silly?

Like I said, this makes no sense to me. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm just extraordinarily dense. I don't know (obviously, I wouldn't). But if so, is there another way that you might present/explain what superdeterminism means that I, and other laymen, might understand? Because what you've written so far doesn't make any sense to me.

How is superdeterminism different from determinism?

Determinism has a pretty simple definition. So, just define superdeterminism. What, exactly, does it refer to (that makes it different from determinism)?

ThomasT

To cause what to happen? Entanglement? But entanglement can be created by zapping spatially separated particles with the same pulses, can't it? If so, then apparently the laser pulses do impart enough common info to produce entanglement.

lugita15

Superdeterminism is a subset of determinism. A
local superdeterministic theory is a local deterministic theory in which the behavior of particles today display Bell-type nonlocal correlation (as opposed to just EPR-type nonlocal correlation) not due to nonlocal interaction today, but due to local interaction in the past. Is that clear enough?