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Entangled entities: Bohr, Einstein and the battle over quantum fundamentals (physicsworld.com)
9 points by rbanffy 7 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments



I had always thought Einstein was being jocular when he said he believed in the God of Spinoza, but his lifelong antipathy to QM points to a seriously held belief. My current understanding of Spinoza is that his God was equivalent to the laws of Physics + an initial state — that which generates the Universe, and conversely to study the Universe was to learn about God. In any case, Spinoza's universe evolved in a strictly determinate manner: like GR, but unlike QM.


You can say QM is deterministic either somewhat trivially in configuration space or with superdeterminism. That's probably good enough for God.

Edit: or even Bohm, if you're pushing "initial state" to the breaking point.


Superdeterminism certainly sounds good enough for a Cartesian Demon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon but for now I'm shelving it right next to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot .

(did Russell influence the Utah Teapot? or was it merely chosen for its variety of curvatures? Looks like Newell is still alive, if I can track him down...)


If Bohr were alive today I think he would find more parallels between tech we create and the universe. I like to ponder that maybe our known universe truly is a single electron behaving similar to scan lines on a TV at Planck scale in a higher dimension. Planck is the hz rate in this parable.




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