This is a story about ethics...
Let us suppose for a moment that the great scientists who gave us our quantum mechanical world, were also animal lovers. Instead of putting cats into boxes with radioactively decaying elements which trigger poison gas to be released, killing the poor innocent creatures, how's about if we dress them up in clothes instead?
In this alternative quantum experiment, instead of Erwin Schroëdinger's original design, we shall instead be putting socks on the poor cat that faced a 50% probability of death before.
In our new experiment, we shall be putting different coloured socks on the cat. The socks can be whatever colour we like, but they're always different colours from each other.
As the cat walks into the room, we can see that the cat is wearing a pink sock. We can't see the cat's other foot yet, but we know that the other sock is not going to be pink.
It's not like the second sock decided to choose its colour when we looked at the first. It's not like the second sock needed to know the colour of the first, and have the information transmitted to it as soon as we made our first observation.
John Stewart Bell penned a tongue-in-cheek scientific paper explaining the simplicity of hidden variables, which seem to offer a much more objective reality than the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. For sure, the likes of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg had elegantly described the subatomic world with mathematical precision, but the need to abandon a tangible objective reality seems unnecessary if we say that there are hidden variables.
However, from this simple thought experiment comes a theory that is very real and very testable. Bell's theorem says that the experimental results will differ significantly in a quantum world versus one that behaves classically. Quantum mechanics makes predictions that no classical theory could. Therefore, if you want to know whether probabilistic behaviour indicates a failure to truly imagine what's going on in the subatomic world, you just have to do the experiments.
If Bell's theorem were proven correct, this could suggest that experimental observations are "known" in advance, and in fact we are living in the 'clockwork' universe as predicted, for example, by Newtonian mechanics. Were you to know the precise starting conditions of everything, you would be able to predict everything that would ever happen: no surprises!
In short, Bell's theorem was tested, and the result was surprising: we may be living in a superdeterministic reality, where there is no free will and all outcomes are fixed in advance.
Tags: #physics