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Forget Determinism! Introducing Superdeterminism
In 1964, Bell confirmed one of the strangest ideas in quantum mechanics: that particles separated across the universe would respond to each other instantaneously no matter how far the distance.
The phenomenon, called quantum entanglement, originated from a paper written in 1935 by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen. The eponymous paradox implied that entangled particles could interact faster than light. When a measurement is performed on one particle with a detector, the other particle instantaneously reacts regardless of its distance from the measured one.
This violates the principle of locality which is the notion that particles can only be influenced by their immediate surroundings, and at a speed no greater than the ultimate speed limit, c.
There seemed to be only one possible conclusion: quantum physics was incomplete.
The only way to preserve locality was to introduce properties of the particles that pre-determined their final state before separation. Hence, when any measurement occurred, the state of the separated partner was already determined based on some unmeasured variable contained within. Nothing needed to travel across the universe to ‘tell’ the particle how to change, because it already ‘knew’. Hence, locality would be saved.
These extra properties of particles were called hidden variables. Quantum mechanics was incomplete because it failed to describe these particular characteristics.
This is where Bell comes in. Bell was able to show that if hidden variables existed, a particular mathematical inequality would need to be upheld. Yet, as it turns out, there are quantum mechanical predictions that violate this inequality and hence particles cannot contain these variables.
To this day, experiments have consistently confirmed that quantum mechanics violates Bell inequalities, meaning quantum entanglement is as weird as it sounds. The states of particles are only determined upon measurement, not by some sneaky hidden information beforehand.
However, there is a loophole to Bell’s theorem. One that could allow us to reintroduce the possibility of hidden variables and lead us to conclude that, just possibly, all of science may be wrong.
