On the one hand, if determinism is a scientific claim, then the experimental evidence of randomness that seems to be irreducible should have falsified it.

On the other hand, if determinism is a metaphysical claim, and if by black holes you mean the actual mysterious objects found in the center of some galaxies, then referring to both in the same essay is an unwarranted act of faith.

On the gripping hand, if by black holes you mean the mathematical anomaly pilpulled about by Stephen Hawking and company, then the information paradox is just an amusing riddle.

TL;DR he clarified to me that you were saying that the functions are deterministic, but what we can measure “in this world” is not.

NichG:

No, what he’s saying is that if you consider the wavefunction to actually be real in and of itself, rather than just describing a probability distribution, then the equation of motion for that wavefunction is deterministic. The equation of motion of the wavefunction is the representation of the laws of physics – it’s the recipe for relating configurations to each other over time.

The randomness comes from making a map from the wavefunction to a down-projection of the wavefunction to a different type of mathematical object (what is called a ‘measurement’ in quantum mechanics). That down-projection violates a conservation law which is part of the equations of motion of the wavefunction (integral |psi|^2 = 1). That means that the operation of the down-projection isn’t actually consistent with the laws of physics written down to govern the wave-function’s evolution. E.g. it is a mathematical event rather than a physical event – nothing in the wavefunction or its evolution tells you that a measurement is about to happen. And in fact, you can always shift a set of measurements in time arbitrarily, so long as you preserve the ordering of measurements, and get the same exact results.

To put it another way, quantum mechanics says that the right way to describe the universe is not as a set of particles with positions ‘x’, but rather to use a joint function over the (very high dimensional) space spanned by all possible values of all the various x’s (and when you go to field theory, it goes a step further with ‘second quantization’, where you also write the wavefunction over the number of particles present, which basically takes into account that particle count is not a conserved quantity). That joint function is the ‘real’ thing, and the calculation of a measurement is a way to take that wavefunction and project it down to a specific value of the ‘x’s – which is what we macroscopically are able to observe.

The tricky bit is that both the experimenter and the experiment are part of that joint function. So to properly do the entire thing as a quantum system, you’d need to write a wavefunction over both the ‘x’ of the particle you’re measuring and also over all the degrees of freedom which describe the experimental apparatus, the experimenter, their brain, their perception of the result, etc, etc. And basically, that’s untenable. So instead, you have to use a projection which implicitly integrates over all of those possibilities.

Another way to put it is that if you think of the different projections of the full wavefunction as states which you could be in, you could ask ‘what could someone limited to the information of one projection of the wavefunction infer about this other projection of the wavefunction?’. That question is what you’re asking mathematically when you write down a quantum measurement. The reason you need to hypothesize that limitation is that you, as the experimenter, are also part of the full quantum system.

There’s a bit extra having to do with the linearity of quantum mechanics that matters here, but it gets a bit more mathy. Basically you could ask, how do you know that one component state of the full wavefunction can’t ‘know’ about the amplitude of another component state (e.g. have temporal correlations which allows that to be determined post-hoc)? However, since QM is linear, you can add and subtract solutions of the wave equation and still have a solution of the wave equation. That is to say, solutions are decomposable in such a way that their time evolutions are completely and totally independent. So even if you do an experiment and measure the particle position ‘x=1’, there’s no way to know what the amplitude in the full wavefunction for ‘x=0’ or ‘x=-1’ or whatever (including versions of you observing those values) would be. At best, you can use the overall conservation law integral |psi|^2 = 1 to constrain the maximum possible integrated squared amplitude of those other components.

(1) Assume that you know what you’re talking about, and assume that the reason you sound so “controversial” is because popular science sources (even the most responsible ones) have been “lying to us”, simplifying the details and giving us a false superficial understanding. While this is possible, IMO it is very unlikely that this most fundamental principle of “quantum mechanics is probabilistic” is a case of over-simplification.

Why? Because we have way too many credible sources relaying that principle to us. Even Bohr basically said QM is probabilistic when arguing with Einstein; he certainly wouldn’t be “dumbing things down” for Einstein in a scientific debate.

(2) Assume that the reason your post is so indecipherable is precisely because it is indecipherable: It is pseudoscientific babble by someone good at making falsehood sound intelligent. This is because even wrong conclusions can seem intelligent; all it takes is one mistake in the equations.

It always bugs me a bit when people talk of quantum physics being fundamentally probabilistic, when none of the processes are probabilistic. The Schrödinger equation produces yields a state that is exactly determined by the initial state, and so do all other purely quantum physical models, including those operating on mixed states, *unless* you trace more things out of the system, i.e. ignore information you already knew or ignore information added to the system.

“Measurement”, as much as it’s talked about in the context of quantum physics, cannot be described as a quantum physical process unless it’s a unitary operation, which can only be done if you include the things measuring the quantum system in the state, in which case, it’s deterministic. It’s only when you ignore (trace out) the state of the measurement apparatus and observers that you get a probabilistic result. Thus, the only source of randomness in the quantum system is everything that you *don’t* treat as a quantum system, not the quantum system itself.

If you consider the universe to be in a pure quantum state at some point in time and only acting by the laws of quantum physics, it will always remain in a pure quantum state, and thus entropy is a constant zero, i.e. probability 1 of being in a single quantum state at each point in time. If you consider such a universe to be in a mixed quantum state at some point in time, entropy still remains constant.

if this is an accurate description, then a neutron start at the cusp of collapsing into a black hole has it’s maximum pressure at the centre, and it’s maximum time space distortion at the stars surface. When neutrons start to collapse at the core, the shell starts rushing in and the surface shrinks until it passes the Schwarzschild radius…. and becomes a black hole…

I wonder though – the surface disappearing, from an external observer, would slow down, just as described above – is there a circumstance where the Schwarzschild radius conditions are reached inside the surface of the neutron star… In which case, you could still see the surface of the star, for ever.

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0801/0801.0337.pdf
http://brianwhitworth.com/BW-VRT1.pdf

As far as I can tell, he’s not saying current scientific evidence is wrong or other such common conspiracy claims. Rather, he’s challenging current basic philosophical assumptions in Physics (similar to what you described in your “Plato Aristotle Socrates Morons” post). He’s saying that current Physics is increasingly tying itself in mathematical knots in order to interpret the evidence, and perhaps a new unconventional point of view will lead to the Grand Unified Theory of our dreams.

I think he was brought into the popular consciousness when his ideas were used in the show Through The Wormhole (popular science clickbait in the form of TV).