Abstract
From what is known today about the elementary particles of matter and the forces that control their behaviour, it may be observed that a host of obstacles to our further understanding remain to be overcome. Most researchers conclude that drastically new concepts must be investigated, new starting points are needed, older structures and theories, in spite of their successes, will have to be overthrown, and new, superintelligent questions will have to be asked and investigated. In short, they say that we shall need new physics. Here, we argue in a different manner. Today, no prototype, or toy model, of any so-called theory of everything exists, because the demands required of such a theory appear to be conflicting. The demands that we propose include locality, special and general relativity, together with a fundamental finiteness not only of the forces and amplitudes, but also of nature’s set of dynamical variables. We claim that the two ingredients we have today, quantum field theory and general relativity, do indeed go a long way towards satisfying such elementary requirements. Putting everything together in a grand synthesis is like solving a gigantic puzzle. We argue that we need the correct analytical tools to solve this puzzle. Finally, it seems obvious that this solution will leave room neither for `divine intervention’, nor for `free will’, an observation that, all by itself, can be used as a clue. We claim that this reflects on our understanding of the deeper logic underlying quantum mechanics.
Presented at the Workshop on ‘Determinism and Free Will’, Milan, May 13, 2017.
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Notes
- 1.
Here, superdeterminism is not intended to mean pre-determinism, the idea that the future may be fixed prior to the action of physical law, but rather ordinary determinism that also has to apply to any observer who chooses what to observe.
- 2.
This is only meant metaphorically; this author, fortunately, is not religious.
- 3.
This can also be rephrased as follows: the assumption that, in the initial state, the experimenter can always produce any entangled state of photons as he or she pleases is not true. There will be strong and uncontrollable—entangled—correlations with other atoms in the system.
- 4.
In contrast, the commutator of two operators defined on a pair of space-time points does vanish outside the light cone. The commutator can be seen to monitor causal influences of one operator on the value of the other, and so one can prove that a non-vanishing commutator will enable experimenters to send signals to one another, while the correlation function only points towards a common past of the pair of space-time points. Bell was aware of the use of commutators to define causality (‘no Bell telephone’), but he needed something stronger, which we now refute.
- 5.
The new ontological state cannot have overlaps with the old ontological state, because Alice’s and Bob’s settings \(a\) and \(b\) are classical.
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Scardigli, F., ’t Hooft, G., Severino, E., Coda, P. (2019). Free Will in the Theory of Everything. In: Determinism and Free Will. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05505-9_2
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