Quantum Physics Is on the Wrong Track, Says Breakthrough Prize Winner

He argues:

There must be an underlying deterministic system. - We don’t know what it is yet. - Quantum mechanics is incomplete, not wrong — it hides deeper rules. - His belief is based on logic, not current experimental proof.

In short, he says we don’t know what it is, but it’s something out there.

Very interesting. Isn't this calling for hidden variables again? I thought physicists largely dropped the idea in favour of Copenhagen interpretation. As a layman, this is exciting. Quantum mechanics really puts a barrier in terms of understanding through intuition, and if this leads to some new interpretation that is more "digestible", it might open up more things to access and learn about.

As far as I can tell, it's Bell's Theorem which shows that results we see can't be the result of hidden variables, so either this guy is throwing out this very well known and uncontroversial point, or he's doing something a bit more subtle.

I ain't no physicist but I learned about Bell's Theorem from a video where Feynman is explaining it in terms of boxes with buttons and lights on them, while dressed in a tracksuit. The audience keep asking questions so he goes over the idea about two dozen times, but that's not necessarily a bad thing in this case.

He seems to have decided there has to be a classical basis underlying quantum results. But offers no reasoning as to why he believes this. I'm sceptical.

I mean this much is clear within the physics community that we haven't found a complete understanding of quantum physics. We can explain what we can test and view but that is it. Wrong is such a strong term but I am sure some aspects will be revised with new information. We won't be spot on with everything.

I would recommend reading Chiara Marletto's book on Constructor Theory which is an attempt at breaking physics into fundamental can and can nots, which is a start for the next step of determining the missing physical rules.

> As far as I can tell, it's Bell's Theorem which shows that results we see can't be the result of hidden variables

Strictly speaking, it can't be the result of local hidden variables under the assumption that you can make decisions in the detector that are independent of the experiment that you're doing. Usually those who argue for something like hidden variables try to find wriggle room in the latter part (that these decisions are somehow inherently correlated with what's being measured). But this is also deeply weird, because you could base these decisions in principle on information that has not had a causal relationship with the experiment since the start of the universe. (this idea is called superdeterminism)

This is formalized in the Kochen–Specker theorem [1]. Quantum mechanics is shown to incompatible with the following three assumptions being true simultaneously: (1) locality, (2) non-contextually (independent of the context of the experiments (3) realism.

AFAIK, at least one assumption needs to go.

There is a nice paper by N. David Mermin illustrating the incompatibility [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kochen%E2%80%93Specker_theor...

[2] https://www.physics.wisc.edu/courses/home/spring2020/407/exp...

I have never been able to understand how Bell's Theorem disproves hidden variables. The argument I hear is that when you measure spin of a particle pair 120° apart, they agree only 1/4 times instead of the expected 1/3. But who says the expected should be 1/3? Hidden variables give you an escape that can define anything you want it to. That's the point of a hidden variable, isn't it? Maybe the hidden variable function itself is such that the interaction when measuring along 120° is not symmetrical to that when measuring along 240°, and so could yield results different from 1/3 probability.