"Science assumes the freedom of the experimentalist"

[Kuznetzova]

Anton Zeilinger. 2010

We always implicitly assume the freedom of the experimentalist... This fundamental assumption is essential to doing science. If this were not true, then, I suggest, it would make no sense at all to ask nature questions in an experiment, since then nature could determine what our questions are, and that could guide our questions such that we arrive at a false picture of nature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

[Skip]

Science assumes a freedom... but the scientist, his abilities, means and access are always limited by nature, and his activities are always regulated by society. Otherwise, scientists would be dangerous monsters.

[Bill Wiltrack]

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I think I know what you mean...





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[Impenitent]

and yet all science obeys the law of gravity...

-Imp

[Skip]

All mass obeys the laws of gravity. Science has no mass; it is an intellectual process: it obeys rules of inquiry and discussion made up by people.

[tillingborn]

Anton Zeilinger. 2010

We always implicitly assume the freedom of the experimentalist... This fundamental assumption is essential to doing science. If this were not true, then, I suggest, it would make no sense at all to ask nature questions in an experiment, since then nature could determine what our questions are, and that could guide our questions such that we arrive at a false picture of nature.

Does it make any difference? It doesn't actually matter to science whether we have a metaphysics that corresponds to reality or not. Perhaps 'nature could determine what our questions are', but as long as nature consistently gives us the same false picture it remains science, in that the the observations will be consistent with theory.
Superdeterminism may be true, but I cannot conceive of any choice of experiment that some diehard couldn't insist was guided by nature. In other words, so what?

[Arising_uk]

I think I know what you mean...

Not a scientist, just a businessman who wanted to put Tesla out of business until he could convert his power companies from DC.

[Kuznetzova]

Superdeterminism may be true, but I cannot conceive of any choice of experiment that some diehard couldn't insist was guided by nature. In other words, so what?

So what? John Bell actually admitted that all (every last one) of the quantum oddities involving entangled particles all vanish the moment we admit that the experimentalists have no free will whatsoever. To see how shockingly shocking this is, let me break down exactly what this suggests.

Normally the way we understands how reality and information proceeds is that a human being who is totally free-willed will make a decision to perform some action. These include decisions for example, should I buy an apple juice or an orange juice at the 7-11 -- up to and including -- a scientist deciding to flip the orientation of a polarizer in a lab while a photon is in mid flight. That is to say, there is nothing peculiar about quantum states in optics labs that precludes this argument.

Normally then we think that physical world proceeds like thus: When the human being makes a decision in their minds, there is no way other portions of reality could know this nor respond to it. This information is, in some strange way, locked away from physical reality as a whole. These freely willed decisions then come into the physical universe from a "nether realm." Between the point in time in which the human brain makes the decision and the point in future when the reaction to this by photons (or 7-11 juice sections), must propagate from the source to the destination.

This is why, when presented with polarized entangled photons, we react emotionally with things like: "How could photonB have known the polarization of photonA?" As if the photon's "mind" has to get the information from the other photon in order to react to it!

Or this one: "How could the photon have known there was a detector at one of the slits, and stop interfering with itself?"

Note. If you place a detector at slit no.2 and then destroy the information it collects so no one can retrieve it, the photon goes back to interfering with itself. Thus leading a typical (very human) emotional outburst: "How could the photon have known the researcher was planning to erase this information??"

What needs to be said here is that photons are not "little men" who have "minds" requiring information so that they can "react" to it. They are physical phenomena who manifest laws of geometrical interference in space and time. That is obvious. But it must be said, in order to frame the shocking punchline. So are we.

So. Are. We.