Superdeterministic hidden-variables models I: nonequilibrium and signalling

Abstract

This is the first of two papers which attempt to comprehensively analyse superdeterministic hidden-variables models of Bell correlations. We first give an overview of superdeterminism and discuss various criticisms of it raised in the literature. We argue that the most common criticism, the violation of `free-will', is incorrect. We take up Bell's intuitive criticism that these models are `conspiratorial'. To develop this further, we introduce nonequilibrium extensions of superdeterministic models. We show that the measurement statistics of these extended models depend on the physical system used to determine the measurement settings. This suggests a fine-tuning in order to eliminate this dependence from experimental observation. We also study the signalling properties of these extended models. We show that although they generally violate the formal no-signalling constraints, this violation cannot be equated to an actual signal. We therefore suggest that the so-called no-signalling constraints be more appropriately named the marginal-independence constraints. We discuss the mechanism by which marginal-independence is violated in superdeterministic models. Lastly, we consider a hypothetical scenario where two experimenters use the apparent-signalling of a superdeterministic model to communicate with each other. This scenario suggests another conspiratorial feature peculiar to superdeterminism. These suggestions are quantitatively developed in the second paper.

arXiv commentPost-print version

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Cited by in corpus (8)

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• A Toy Model for Local and Deterministic Wave-function Collapse
• Counterfactual restrictions and Bell's theorem
• Superdeterministic hidden-variables models II: conspiracy
• Analysis of the superdeterministic Invariant-set theory in a hidden-variable setting
• Taxonomy for Physics Beyond Quantum Mechanics
• Implications of Local Friendliness violation for quantum causality