Why This Nobel Prize Winner Thinks Quantum Mechanics is Nonsense

Gerard Tor won the Nobel Prize in 1999 and the recent Breakthrough Prize for his work on the standard model of particle physics. He also thinks that quantum mechanics is nonsense. Indeed, he has an alternative theory for quantum mechanics that he says is how the world really works.

This theory has been almost entirely ignored by physicists which is unfortunate because he predicts a limit for what quantum computers can do. Today I want to tell you about to's ideas about quantum physics to the extent that I understand them. I learned this from a book he's written called the cellular automatan interpretation of quantum mechanics.

In his own words, the subject of this book is the reality behind quantum mechanics. But the book isn't just about quantum mechanics because this new reality would then be the basis of all of physics. As puts it, what we are really after is a new approach towards guessing what the theory of the world is.

Let's start with a quick reminder of how quantum mechanics normally works. We're used to objects having definite properties that you can quantify. This desk is white.

This chair is solid. And this sentence makes sense so far. In quantum mechanics, it doesn't work like that.

Instead, everything is described by a wave function. It's usually denoted by the capital Greek letter sigh. Basically, quantum mechanics is all about big size.

The wave function describes the state of a system. The system could be, for example, the particle and the state could be its position. But then the wave function usually doesn't tell you exactly what the particle is doing or where it is.

It just gives you a probability that you can calculate from the wave function. The wave function might tell you for example that the particle has a 50% probability say being on the left side of the screen and a 50% probability of being on the right side. Then if you measure the particle you know it's say left with 100% probability.

But the probability came from the wave function. So that means if you make a measurement you need to update the wave function to reflect the change in probability. This is called the collapse of the wave function or the reduction or the update.

The issue is that this collapse isn't local. It doesn't start at one place and then spreads from there. It happens at one instant everywhere faster than the speed of light.

That the collapse of the wave function breaks the speed of light limit is why Einstein didn't like quantum mechanics. I think Einstein was right and to think so too. The way that Toft wants to improve quantum physics is by doing away with the collapse of the wave function.

And he does that by getting rid of free will by making quantum mechanics entirely deterministic. In its current version, quantum mechanics isn't deterministic because the wave function only gives you probabilities. It doesn't determine the result of a measurement.

In tool's version, it does. It's just that we can't predict the result because we lack information. That is to says that the randomness of quantum mechanics has the same origin as any other randomness we observe.

Like when you say throw a die. It's not that the outcome of the throw wasn't determined. We just can't calculate it because we don't know the exact initial state.

This again is also what Einstein thought and why he said God does not play dice. Okay, so to wants to return us to determinism, but what does free will have to do with that? For one thing, philosophers have debated for a few thousand years whether determinism is compatible with free will.

So quite possibly just the act of returning to determinism upsets some people's ideas of free will. Then again, most philosophers also agree that the indeterminism of quantum mechanics doesn't give you free will either. So basically, it doesn't matter.

Free will doesn't make sense whether or not quantum mechanics has a deterministic root. But this somewhat philosophical question actually isn't why to is talking about free will. He talks about this because some notion of free will is an assumption for the most famous proof that quantum mechanics is supposedly correct.

This famous proof is what received the Nobel Prize in 2022. And yes, I'm talking about tests of Bell's theorem. Bell's theorem says that a deterministic theory which is local.

So what tool wants will given certain extra assumptions obey an inequality for the correlations between certain measurement results. Experiments violate this inequality. Hence the vast majority of physicists conclude a deterministic and local theory can't explain our observations.

But to says the problem is the extra assumptions to Bell's theorem. One of which is that the experimenters can freely choose what they will measure. And that is where free will comes in.

Dwarf points out that in a fully deterministic theory, whatever the experimental chooses was also determined. Everything that has happened does happen and will happen was already encoded in the initial conditions at the Big Bang. If you weren't around at the Big Bang, that's a shame.

It was quite the event. But don't worry, you don't need to know what happened. It only matters that this information exists because that explains why the measurement outcome always fits to the measurement settings.

To is very unapologetic about his dismissal of free will. He writes, "Like it or not, the experimental actions are determined by laws of physics. Their decisions logically have their roots in the distant past going back all the way to the big bang.

But what does this mean? What exactly was determined? What was determined is that the experiment and the system that you were looking at must be correlated with what you measure and these correlations must have been present already in the initial state of the universe.

About this tool writes it clearly is a mysterious correlation but it is not at odds with what we know about the laws of physics. This is the important point of To's proposal and what has sometimes been called superdeterminism that the decision of what you measure is correlated with the state of the system that you measure. It's not a causation.

It's not that the wave function of an electron makes a particle physicist turn a knob. It's just that the laws of nature are so that the two things must always fit together. To also think that the issue of free will in quantum mechanics is somewhat of a red herring because what we're really talking about is just a mathematical model that helps us make predictions.

As he writes, the notion of free will must be replaced with a notion that a useful model of nature should give correct predictions. Somewhat more technically, to says the following. The wave function that we use in quantum mechanics is all well and good to describe what's going on, but it isn't real.

There is, however, a different wave function which is real. He calls it ontological. And that wave function is one which always gives a 100% probability of getting a particular measurement result.

In particular, the states that we think of as classical, non-quantum, are ontological. They're real. A dead cat is real and a life cat is real.

But a dead and alive cat isn't real in Tor's framework. So he doesn't say that the quantum mechanics we currently use is wrong. It's just that we interpret it the wrong way.

When we set up an experiment and we write down the wave function for it, then this wave function does not describe the actual real state of the system. It describes the probabilities that the real state could be because we lack information. And this all sounds very nice and reasonable.

But the price you have to pay is that you need this correlation between the thing that you're going to measure and what you measure about it. To spoke is called the cellular automaton interpretation of quantum mechanics. But I haven't said anything about cellular automter.

So what is this about? Cellular automter are what to think makes up the deterministic basis behind quantum physics. A cellular automaton is a compact or localized object that proceeds in discrete time steps.

A cellular automaton can interact with its neighbors and we know that this can give rise to surprisingly complex emergent features. Steven Wolfrom whose theory of everything we've talked about in a previous video also uses a version of cellular automatter. For too oft the relevant thing is that the cellular automatter only interact with their neighbors.

They have what we call a nearest neighbor interaction. This matters for To's purposes because remember we want to have a local theory no faster than light stuff going on. To cellular automat basically quantum versions of gears.

He thinks that something like this is what the universe is ultimately made up of in extremely tiny versions at the plank scale. Imagine a screen displaying the evolution of our cellular automaton. we imagine its pixels to have roughly the size of one plank length 10 the minus 33 cm.

So the cellular automata are ridiculously tiny and they combine together to give rise to what we call particles and presumably space itself. And because he thinks that the ultimate nature of reality has something to do with the plank scale, he also thinks that quantum computers will eventually run out of steam. This is because they must make do with these ontological states in the cellular automaton.

And these are far fewer states than physicists currently believe are real. He writes, "Factoring a number with millions of digits into its prime factors will not be possible. If engineers ever succeed in making such quantum computers, it seems to me that the cellular automaton theory is falsified.

If you've already forgotten half of what I said, this video comes with a quiz that lets you check how much you remember. " Okay, so that's what to say. Now, let me tell you what I think about this.

First of all, I think that he's mixing together two different ideas. One is this idea with the ontological states and how to formulate a local and deterministic theory that underlies quantum physics. The other is the stuff with the cellular automter.

I'm not super excited about the cellular automter because anything discrete be that in space or in time will violate the symmetries of Einstein's theories and it's very difficult to make that work without being crudely in conflict with data already to knows this of course but I think the problem is more serious than he makes it sound that discrete cellular automatter have this problem with the symmetries of Einstein's theory reason is why I believe Steven Wolfrram began using these hyperraphs. These have a much more difficult update rule than steps in time and they're compatible with Einstein's theories. Now, about to's idea for the onlogical states.

Yes, I think you can do it. But in all honesty, I don't see the practical use because he doesn't explain what the ontological states are or how you could ever figure out what they are. And without that, you can't do anything with this idea.

Now, look, what I just said may be wrong and maybe he solved a big problem. It's just that we're all too stupid to understand it. But on a practical level, I don't know what to do with this interpretation.

Be that as it may, I think this is a very interesting proposal. At the very least, it's a fresh perspective on an old problem. It's also somewhat of a sad story because Tor's ideas about quantum physics have been ignored by almost all physicists.

You'd think that someone with as many credentials as To would have a chance that his ideas be taken seriously, but evidently not. So, what do you think about this? Does Tor's idea make more sense than quantum physics, or are they both equally incomprehensible?

Let me know in the comments. Yes, I've been talking about quantum mechanics again. Did you know that I have a course on quantum mechanics that you can take for free on Brilliant?

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