Monday, September 29, 2025

Latest Silly Paper on Superdeterminism

Someone on Aaronson's blog attacked me for not wanting to read papers on superdeterminism. Here is the latest such paper, by Waegell, Mordecai and McQueen, Kelvin J., so you can see for yourself what garbage it is.
Bell’s theorem demonstrates that any physical theory that is consistent with the predictions of quantum mechanics, and which satisfies some apparently innocuous assumptions, must violate the principle of local causality.
Those innocuous assumptions include being a classical theory, so quantum mechanics can still satisfy local causality and the Bell test experiments. The whole subject is only interesting to those who want to deny QM.
What then are we to make of the scientific status of superdeterminism? Should we deem it unscientific or pseudo-scientific? ...

Superdeterminism, presently, is therefore neither scientific nor unscientific, it is better thought of as being in a pre-scientific stage, where we are still coming to grips with what such mod- els require, and we are only just beginning to propose simple toy models

This is like what Peter Woit calls Not even wrong. Not only is there no way to test it, there is no way to even say whether the theory can be made scientific or not.

The Flat Earth people say that a round Earth violates their intuitions, so they look for evidence for a Flat Earth. The superdeterminism folks are much worse. They say that QM violates their intuitions, but make no attempt to find evidence against QM. Instead they theorize that a primordial conspiracy is tricking us into thinking the evidence favors QM.

No, the superdeterminism papers are not worth reading.

1 comment:

  1. Pauli was the originator of the phrase "not even wrong", Woit just took it for his title.

    ReplyDelete

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