I'm not even going to try this time, I'm just going to say to everybody reading this: superdeterminism is not at all the same thing as determinism. It is a far stronger assumption with far far more unintuitive consequences for our understanding of nature. If you're reading this and just thinking "superdeterminism is okay because there's no free will", then you've been suckered by this article into believing a massive oversimplification.

I'm listening to the Into to QM course from mit's open courseware [0] and I have to say that QM represents a complete break with the classical past, not because of a scientist's ambition or a quirk of history, but because the experimental evidence demands it. The evidence results in a few postulates, and QM is really the only theory that satisfies the postulates, in the sense that any theory that satisfies those postulates will look like Schroedinger's eq. The story is not over at all, we're still very much at the beginning of understanding it.

[0] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-04-quantum-physics-i-s...

What are the scientific arguments against decoherence? What do up-to-date theoreticians think?

The problem with decoherence is that the underlying physics of the wave function is still profoundly non-local in the sense that regions of the wave function don't have a simple relationship with regions of physical space.

And yet, classically, the notion of locality pertains precisely to physical space and is deeply related to fundamental physics. In fact, locality is still fundamental to the formulation of quantum mechanical theories, even if the quantum mechanical description ends up having some non-local features. And there isn't any philosophical or physical intuition that resolves this disconnect.

Decoherence has a variety of other philosophical issues. In particular, it requires that we accept the idea of the wave function (something we never see or interact with directly, for which we have no direct evidence) as fundamental and real AND that we take our day to day experiences, upon which all of our physical sciences are based, as derived, perhaps even, in important ways, not really real. In any case, the actual theoretical terms in which decoherence actually resolves the measurement paradox aren't fully understood either mathematically or in terms of the fundamental ontological status of things.

I don't see why locality is a requirement. What is it that makes a theory with particles being points in a six-dimensional position-momentum space acceptable, but particles being complex-valued functions over a three dimensional space unacceptable?

> it requires that we accept the idea of the wave function (something we never see or interact with directly, for which we have no direct evidence) as fundamental and real AND that we take our day to day experiences, upon which all of our physical sciences are based, as derived, perhaps even, in important ways, not really real.

I see no issue in pure quantum states being fundamental. Our day to day experiences are not compatible with a number of things we hold to be true. Take the physics of fluids for example, it suggests that liquids are infinitely dividable, which we know to be false. In that sense, fluid physics is decidedly not real. But it can also be derived as a very good approximation of the underlying reality on larger scales, similarly to how classical theories are good approximations of the underlying quantum reality on larger scales.

I do realize that my interpretation requires decoherence to work such that the pure quantum states reduce to ones that are well approximated by classical theories, and I'm not sure if we have evidence that decoherence works this way.

And people do debate how to derive our single world experience from many worlds. It can’t be done without more assumptions.

Many in this field do accept it, but say the other worlds are not real (QBism, dBB).

But that position is philosophically weak, so those against many worlds still look for alternatives.

Decoherence or more strongly environmental super-selection from something like electromagnetic scattering, results in a Classical probability distribution over the macroscopic observables or more accurately renders the algebra of classical properties Boolean. This means there is no interference between the terms and the probabilities are simply ignorance of facts which have occurred.

Once this superselection process has occurred the mathematical structure of macroscopic observables is just as it is in classical statistical mechanics. There's no need to read this as multiple worlds, although you can if you want to. If interference terms persisted you might have more of a case for Many Worlds. Even then though there are other ways of reading the formalism.

Decoherence doesn't give you single outcomes, but it gives you a classical probability distribution (like an enthropic ensemble) over pure quantum states, with the pure quantum states having reduced coherence (i.e. they 'look classical').

Classical probability distributions are nothing new, we don't need a many worlds interpretation to explain the butterfly effect.

Quantum states with a small amount of residual superposition also seem fine to me, as long as you are willing to accept that the world is ultimately quantum and not classical. That we don't see any quantum effects in daily life is just because the scales are too small, similar to how we don't observe relativistic effects because the scales are too large, or how we don't observe the atomicity of water. But in all these cases we can do experiments to reveal the true nature.

But at no point does one world even approximately emerge - it’s always many. I can say only the one I experience is real, but there’s no justification for it.

Your main problem though is thinking classically - you can't justify your theory by saying it can be reduced (after an infinite amount of time) to an old way of thinking. Classical probability is fraught with issues; just saying it’s always been acceptable isn’t true nor a rational argument.

If you're not familiar with these terms I can explain.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm aware that Bell's theorem says that QM must either break locality or realism, but I don't really understand why it can't break locality. While incredibly inconvenient, wouldn't that solve the problem? Again, I realise I'm naive, so I don't actually suppose my line of reasoning is correct ;-)

This makes no sense unless the speed of light is a fundamental physical constant, so that motion in general depends on the speed of light, which is what special relativity postulates.

Now there are ways to have a special kind of non-locality that do not violate special relativity - you can have phenomena that happen at infinite speed, but only if they do not carry mass or energy or any information at all. The common interpretation of wave-function collapse is an example of such a phenomenon.

I'd also note that the famous E=mc^2 is also a limit on speed, since kinetic energy (mv^2/2) is part of the total energy of an object.

I think that may be the reason it's not very popular: ok, so we've got these faster-than-light pilot waves, but we can't actually use them to do anything faster than light. They're just there for bookkeeping. (That said, Many Worlds suffers from the same problem, but it's very popular. They're two different ways of slicing up the same equation. You pick whichever one suits you.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_wave_theory

If the simplest and most consistent math is a non-physical pilot wave, I don't think this really matters if it lets you calculate something more easily or correctly. I don't personally know how to use them (my five QM courses used traditional techniques) but if they give useful results it hardly matters if they're "real".

My good friend did his undergraduate thesis by noticing that Clebsch–Gordan coefficients could be used to describe grain boundary orientations in polycrystalline materials. Doesn't mean grain boundaries have spin. It's just math that was convenient and worked well.

That said, physics advances do sometimes come from asking "What if X is real?" The positron and electron spins are both poster children for that. Instead of just shutting up and calculating, people focused on the part of the calculation that seemed to imply the existence of an unobserved thing. We could, in fact, have kept going with a physics in which positrons were merely calculation conveniences; that physics is valid. But we might not have discovered the Standard Model that way.

So I'm of two minds... and in a lot of ways, I'm not really entitled to be of any minds, since my formal education stopped at undergrad, and I'm no longer capable of doing even that much math. I get leery when people with even less education want to "understand" without doing any of the math, because I fear that the best of explanations will only mislead them.

It's not like it is exclusive, everyone thinks a bit different thankfully. Like your example of the positron and electron seems fine; math and experiment in a cycle of discovery. You wouldn't know to look for a positron if you didn't study the electron experimentally and try to come up with some math for it.

The big problem with infinite speeds is that, somewhat like superdeterminism, they mean that you can't do fully controlled experiments. If effects can propagate at infinite speeds, the whe universe has an impact on any experiment, including the state of your measuring apparatus and so on. That doesn't make them impossible, but it explains why they are disliked in theories.

\* even with Newtonian physics, the universal attraction of any object does have non-0 values everywhere, but we know that the influence is negligible. However, with global hidden variables, the speed a billiard ball will take when I hit it may depend on the size of a planet in a different galactic cluster.

Every experiment does depend on the entire state of the universe, even in QM, but those influences are typically small due to symmetries. At the quantum level, many of these symmetries no longer apply.

In any case, quantum field theories are good at predicting stuff but almost certainly not descriptions of the true fundamental dynamics of the universe, given their known and relatively well understood divergences.

I disagree, with the following example to back up why I believe it is less weird.

Superdeterminism can mean that faraway events can be correlated by a common ancestry. For instance: if you suddenly create a massive object, it will attract massive objects indiscriminately spherically; most points in space will be eventually affected, and so, they all are limited in the space of possibilities, no matter whether you can actually detect gravity.

In the case of quantum mechanics, there may well be some currently-undetectable field similar to the gravitational one, which is very chaotic at a nanoscopic level, but that is severely constrained in the shape it can form, even across large distances.

It is similar to how a large-space LCG (the PRNG) may look extremely random, but if you plotted consecutive numbers as coordinates across the complete cycle, you would get a lattice. Locally chaotic, but globally constrained.

On the other hand, non-locality means superluminar information, which really breaks the common understanding of spacetime and of causality.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

Except Zeilinger is wrong. The freedom of the experimenter is not fundamental to the scientific process, rather the nature of the experimenter's complexity is what matters. Even simple deterministic algorithms can explore an entire state space, and given we are capable of simulating such algorithms with our brains (Turing completeness), we are therefore also capable of exploring the full state space of physical theories.

Furthermore, it is not a false picture of nature at all. It very clearly describes the behaviour of that which is observable, which is exactly what science is designed to do.

It is like mixing implementation details of a particular Python script with a theory of programming languages.

Experimental observations of violations of Bell equations tell that no, one cannot tell the evolution of the local patch from the patch alone. Standard interpretation of quantum mechanics and physical super-determinism are just different ways to explain this.

In particular the standard quantum mechanics assumes that things are still local, but the wave function is not observable in principle so we can only talk about statistical properties. Super-determinisme assumes that things are not local and tries to explain how.

In philosophy determinism is essentially the opposite of free will. It implies that what people perceive as personal free will is an illusion. But this has nothing to do with the determinism of physical models. In particular, free will is compatible with physical determinism of what one perceives as an external world. One possible explanation of how this is possible is that the act of free will changes both future and past. So it looks like the future state reflecting the choice of will is deterministically follows from the past. It is just the past is different from what would be if the choice would be different. Stanford encyclopedia entry on free will has more splendid explanations.

> But this has nothing to do with the determinism of physical models.

It seems rather confusing to state it has nothing to do with determinism of physical models. More accurately, it does have to do with determinism of physical models if you assume a physicalist perspective, but it might not, though then you have to resort to much more involved and comprehensive models of what consciousness and will are (like changing both the future and past).

This is similar with the notion of time. A typical perception is that only now exists. Yet according to physics there is no now. All our physical models based on experience imply that the universe is 4-dimensional static something. There is no now and all points across the time dimension have same properties just as points across space.

One needs metaphysics to try to explain this discrepancy between perception and very successful physical models.

I'm not sure what you mean by this so I'm also not sure how to address it, but it does seem reasonable to assume free will simply does not exist exactly because phenomena is either deterministic or stochastic, not some third option which would allow free will. This view is informed by physics.

> There is no now and all points across the time dimension have same properties just as points across space.

This is a much more interesting problem and one that has kept me up many times.

As for the problem of now, for me it is similar to the problem of free will. Starting from Parmenides and Buddha one way to resolve this was to declare that the perception of now and movement is an illusion similar to the notion of free will. And as with free will, that will be compatible with physical models and the opposite cannot be expressed within physical models.

How do you know, that there is no non-local influence, that makes your predictions "from the patch alone" incorrect? I don't think this can be easily excluded as a possibility.

We can assume that there is no non-local influence and try to make progress from there, but we might be wrong about it, which is what the article is getting at, if I understand it correctly.

Only if you take the experimenter and his decision as part of the local patch, and take the decision to be determined by the same state which also determines the experiment's outcome, which is essentially what superdeterminism is, no?

Basically the metaphysical determinism says, that everything is predetermined and if something seems random, it is simply because of something we do not know yet or something that is too complex to be calculated, so that we cannot predict the event that seems random. Whatever physicists come up with, for example quantum whatever, one can always say: Well, it seems random, but I believe, that there is something we have not yet discovered or don't yet know about, which makes things behave exactly as they are, completely deterministic.

At that point it becomes a believe, not a science. You can always add an unknown (or "hidden variable"). Personally, I do not think this believe is in any way worse, than the believe, that something "simply happens at random" with "no theoretical way of explaining why". Probably metaphysical determinism in one way or another has always been a big motivator for scientists to continue research.

> But because of the historical legacy, researchers who have worked on or presently work on Superdeterminism have been either ignored or ridiculed.

is too strong. I would say that the historical legacy does not have much to do with it - the reason that superdeterminism is ignored or ridiculed is that it looks absolutely wild to most physicists - much more mind-bending than the vanilla story of the Bell test, which is mad enough to begin with. That's not to say that it is ruled out - just that we have avoided it for pretty sensible reasons, rather than stupidity or some sort of blind spot.

I have to question the validity of this argument, because generations of physicists have been taught to give up realism in order to accept QM. Superdeterminism is no weirder than giving up realism, it's just a weirdness to which you've grown accustomed.

> There is no such thing as a controlled experiment

> The superdeterministic explanation is: "well, there's nothing to explain. You were simply determined to lose by the initial conditions of the universe. It couldn't have gone any other way."

This eventually led me to a quote from Anton Zeilinger about his dislike for it.

> 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.

My question is, does it matter if we are seeing a false picture as long as the result of experiments within it are consistent and lead to new discoveries that themselves are actionable? If everything we experience is in this “false picture” is it really false or simply a different set of rules based on underlying circumstances.

I think the whole point being made by the authors here is that QM is dead-ending and that superdeterminism could give us more answers, not less. Why not see if it leads somewhere?

>authors here is that QM is dead-ending

Copenhagen is dead-ending, not QM.

For the simple reason that all of the other interpretations (Many Worlds, Bohmian, Transactional) only somewhat work with Non-Relativistic QM not with QFT. Only Copenhagen works with QFT.

To quote Dr. Hossenfelder directly: "In standard quantum mechanics the measurement outcomes will be non-correlated. In a superdeterministric hidden variables theory, they'll be correlated - provided you can make a case that the hidden variables don't change in between the measurements." [1]

That last sentence is the catch here: in case the experiment fails to show any correlation, it can always be argued that the hidden variables changed for whatever reason. If the calculated theoretical boundaries (e.g. temperature & measurement time) are insufficient, there's still no way of telling systematic errors from falsifying the initial hypothesis. It's little details like this that theorists can hide behind while still shouting "Foul!" from the peanut gallery.

Since experiments cost time, money, and pin down talent, research facilities need to be picky about what they test. "Because I like it." [2] is not the most compelling argument when trying to make your case ;)

I wonder whether crowd-funding would work in this case...

[1] https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2013/10/testing-conspiracy...

[2] https://www.fetzer-franklin-fund.org/wp-content/uploads/2014...

A lot of really really smart people tried to solve this by experimenting more. It didn't work. It's time for philosophy again, and in my view, also to accept that the weirdness is not going away. Nature doesn't care about what we find weird or not.

As for the author of the article I've never seen a clear proposal but it appears the idea is to do repeated measurements that display quantum effects while reducing noise as much as possible and check if there are deviations from quantum theory.

EDIT: found a more concrete proposal http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2013/10/testing-conspiracy-...

[0] - https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548

Besides to put a person in a superposition may require a machine as large as the universe, so you get issues with the speed of light.

The only way to test MWI is multiverse immortality - many worlds means you should expect to always have some future experience - there is no real death.

EPR experiment does exactly that. In fact, it's a good experiment to get intuitive understanding of MWI.

In standard QM says the measurements should be completely uncorrelated, but she argues that in a superdeterministic theory results somewhat correlated.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1105.4326

Not just the way it's arbitrarily hard from an engineering perspective to design an experiment to disprove string theory. It is theoretically impossible, the way it's impossible to distinguish between Copenhagen and many worlds.

The idea is that superdeterminstic theories are deterministic, while quantum mechanical measurements are random, so you should be able to set up an experiment where QM predicts you would just get random results, but actually you get the same result each time.

Bell coined the term "Superdeterminism" to describe to others of theories that evade his own theorem - theories which are absolutely and completely deterministic. Theories that are only partially deterministic - don't hold up to his theorem. Hence he coined this term to highlight the difference (to those that fail to understand), which again is absolutely/completely vs partially deterministic theories.

As so there's no real difference here. If you understand determinism, then you know that a "partially" deterministic theory is not actually deterministic...

I think it's worth thinking through and delineating superdeterminism to its utmost limits even if I wouldn't necessarily say I find it compelling.

I do wonder why the authors are so quick to reject nonreductionism though, as nonreductionism seems fairly reasonable to me. Maybe I have a different idea of nonreductionism, but it seems to me that rejecting nonreductionism is akin to accepting Laplace's demon which as far as I understand has been disproved. Basically, at some point the information in a system supercedes that of any system that might represent it faithfully, in part because of measurement effects -- there's a lot of parallels with QM issues.

There is nothing in classical physics that suggests the universe is deterministic on cosmic scales. There's plenty in physics which suggests it isn't.

If you want to propose any form of determinism, be it superdeterminism, a bulk universe, or any of the other popular variations, you have to start by proving that causality is infinitely precise and absolute. Because otherwise your causality is partly random and therefore not truly causal at all.

Our experience of causality suggests that real measurements have limited precision, and predictions can only be made on limited timescales.

So anyone who is proposing superdeterminism is claiming that this can be fixed - by hidden variables, with noise-free super-realistic precision, which allow a universe-wide predictive horizon.

Free will is a side issue here, because the problem doesn't go away even if the universe has no observers.

The problem isn't whether free will hides super-predictive hidden variables, it's whether it's plausible that super-predictive hidden variables exist at all.

If you believe they do, you have a first-order universe in which these mysterious entities operate with effectively infinite precision behind the scenes, to create a second-order universe which has limited precision in practice.

Of course that may be happening. But it seems like quite unlikely.

And to a degree, they have a point: Does it really matter if we can predict the exact time and location of an alpha particle as is exits a black hole as hawking radiation? What good does modeling this phenomenon accurately give us?

There are analogues to this in mathematics, for example, our formulation of the Fourier transform has limited precision but the physical phenomenon it relates to has no reason to be limited.

If you can "fix" what that video describes, you'd better start preparing your Fields medal acceptance speech. That you can "get around" it sometimes doesn't remove the underlying math.

So why can't configurations be "far apart" in a way that defies intuition? We model measuring at 45.01° as a perturbation of 45°, but perhaps these are very distant configurations.

> it would render everything pointless as our paths are predetermined

The objection is subtler than this. It's that it's pointless because it's not a productive stance. Science is in large part about predicting results of interventions. It throws its hands up and says everything happens for essentially conspiratorial reasons, and taken fully doesn't admit the possibility of interventions. Further this is stronger than the normal determinism of classical mechanics -- there, even if we believe in determinism, nondeterminism with respect to unobserved things (such as experimenters brains) is a useful stance for discovering truths about the universe. In contrast, with superdeterminism, any possible "intervention" in this stance is "compensated for" by the initial conditions. It explains quantum mechanics only by saying "initial conditions did it", which is no better than "God did it" of medieval philosophy. In neither case can we usefully ask further questions.

Anyway, when you make a rerun of the universe from the same initial conditions, you get randomness because of quantum mechanics, so the future outcome is not exactly the same, and you can't predict anything with certainty because of probabilities. But look, all of this has nothing to do with free will. Neither determinism nor quantum mechanical randomness give you an absolute-metaphysical-libertarian superwill when you're not a subject to the laws of physics at all (unless you believe that you're a soul/cartesian ego/some other supra-physical mental entity with dubious ontological status). You're basically arguing against this abovementioned concept. But actually default, regular free will is just an effective description of reality where persons have volition, and it exists as an emergent rather than fundamental thing.

Before you start to make the same argument that free will doesn't really exist, consider the question: does Hacker News exist? Well, duh, of course not! There are no websites, no Internet and no computers, it's obviously all just fundamental particles acting in some ways, you know, just the wave function of the universe deterministically obeying the Schrodinger equation, etc. Naive reductionism. But here we are, reading Hacker News. Guess what, you don't live on a level of fundamental particles. Does, for example, chess exist? Your argument implies that it does not, but here I am, playing chess in a separate tab.

So, do persons exist?

Does free will exist?

It strikes me that people don't bother to make real arguments against free will, like a psychological one, for example.

Yes, free will doesn't seem possible in a deterministic universe.

> Anyway, when you make a rerun of the universe from the same initial conditions, you get randomness because of quantum mechanics, so the future outcome is not exactly the same, and you can't predict anything with certainty because of probabilities

Then the universe is not deterministic.

> Before you start to make the same argument that free will doesn't really exist, consider the question: does Hacker News exist? Well, duh, of course not! There are no websites, no Internet and no computers, it's obviously all just fundamental particles acting in some ways, you know, just the wave function of the universe deterministically obeying the Schrodinger equation, etc. Naive reductionism.

No, there is a difference between something existing and free will. A computer can calculate an answer to some query, and the answer exists, doesn't mean it was generated through the computer's free will.

For instance, I may decide to have an apple tonight, or spaghetti, or whatever. Thus, I seem to have free will. But if one collected statistics on what I ate over time, there would be patterns and it would be much more difficult for me to overcome those patterns with "will". The more time and events you look at the more you see things like unconcious maintenance of weight, preferences of types of food, and so on.

Yet the long term patterns are made up of the individual choices that seem free.

I have this vague idea that some further exploration of this might be compared to the statistical ideas of quantum mechanics.

The question is essentially, when all biases are accounted for, is there some aspect of free will that remains? You experience free will constantly, and you assume it in all interactions with other agents. Is that an illusion, are we just puppets in a play? Many philosophers believe that it isn't, even if determinism is real. I'm not sure if super-determinism is still compatible or not, but it may well be.

I feel like there's some sort of analogy between how you can have local violations of conservation of energy where particles pop into existence from nowhere, but longer term it has to even out.

Bias isn't the word I would use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-theory_of_time

When you experience a moment of consciousness at a specific 4D position, you experience all the memories of the "past" that are in your brain. Thus, the consciousness particle interpretation of consciousness is compatible with your direct perception of living a 3D life along a time dimension.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

We are on the inside of a 4 dimensional bulk. We are traveling through the temporal dimension.

As opposed to outside of it looking in. In which case we would "see" past, present, and future simultaneously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator

"A pseudorandom number generator (PRNG), also known as a deterministic random bit generator (DRBG)..."

But the measurement setting (PRNG outcome) can be arbitrarily removed from the seed value (by combining PRNGs in various ways). So that doesn't sound very convincing to me.

If you mean true random, then, yes, superdeterminism does indeed mean that number is predetermined.

Math still works though - there is no way for someone to peek and see what that predetermined number is so it is still random for any observer.

The article mentions it but kind of downplays the fact that the prevailing theory of QM has a very clear mathematical formalism without any wiggle room, while superdeterminism doesn't have this.

That seems like a far better explanation for why QM has won, and makes me wonder whether superdeterminism wouldn't just be the next string theory.

It makes a strong case IMHO that there is some meat here. The main idea is that Bell inequalities make ~4 assumptions, which Hossenfelder and Palmer argue can be meanifully weakened in precise ways that have the potential for testable predictions.

The paper also spends some time dispelling the FUD that stems from the unfortunate associations made with the name "superdeterminism."

It's only ~20 pages of mostly prose, so if you're interested, I highly recommend the quick read.

To a computer scientist, superdeterminism seems like the most elegant solution to most of the current problems in physics. But it has always been firmly out of the mainstream, perhaps because it runs directly counter to our human experience. Gerard t'Hoofts framing of the universe as a cellular automaton (https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548) is relatively intuitive, but still only a rough sketch. Hopefully, Hossenfelder and Palmer now publicly arguing for superdeterminism will recruit some more bright minds to fleshing out these models into workable theories.

Two statistical dependent variables "can be made" independent, for example by feeding one into an PRNG. This seems like a similar cop-out as the "particle changes behaviour when it is observed hence consciousness is needed in the universe"

(And this answer explained it better https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-crackpot-scientists-go-aft... as usual for Quora, awful questions with great answers)

No statistical test can assure statistical independence for all possible cases. The very fact that you pipe it through a PRNG means the output is deterministically correlated with the input, because PRNGs are deterministic, and some statistical test will be able to detect it. At the base level, a test that tries every conceivable PRNG, for instance.

In practice the universe can't know all the ways you can mix-up a variable

That's very different from "regardless how you throw the dice it will always "know" what you did".

It's only "very different" in superdeterminism because that which is conserved doesn't yet have a widely accepted formulation that you've internalized the way you've internalized the other common concepts in physics.

The problem is, according to my current understanding, superdeterminism cannot be tested.

I'd be very interested in hearing and explanation and understanding why superdeterminism cannot be tested (it's not clearly obvious to me how that's the case) because if that is the case, it would explain why it was largely unpursued/undeveloped (similar to what someone else in this thread posted--if it's true, it supposeldy offers little useful insight beyond better explaining issues in quantum mechanics by replacing one blackbox of uncertainty with another).

Based on the author's description, much of the issue is that the theory has had little attention and as such, is largely undeveloped (and therefore, isn't going to be developed enough for experimental testing).

What experiment could you run in a superdetermined universe that would distinguish it from a non-superdetermined universe? Vice versa? There's nothing.

This suggests there isn't even some kind of 'local-ish' theory of hidden variables, like in the case of throwing dice, and we would really need to account for the state of the whole universe for all of its history to accurately predict what happens when we type at our keyboards.

Yes, because all particles in the universe share a common entangled past because they all originated from the same source, ie. the Big Bang.

The two that come to mind are gravitational waves and the Higgs Boson.

Gravitational waves were observed by LIGO and Virgo. These observatories were built in 1993/1994, but did not observe a gravitational wave until 2015 (many have been observed since then).

VIRGO costs ~10mil Euro/year to operate and is staffed by over 300 people.

LIGO had an initial budget of $395 million in 1994, with a $200million overhaul in 2015.

The Higgs Boson was detected using the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC began in 1995, and would not discover the Higgs until 2012. The LHC had a construction cost of $4.4 billion, with an annual operating budget of $1billion.

Most of the discoveries of the 20th centuary did not require anywhere near this scale of experiment. There is still some room to grow here (more powerful colliders and more sensitivy gravitational observatories are being planned), but fundamental physisics seems to be fast approaching the limits of our current engineering capabilities; and may need to enter a quite period while it waits for the more applied sciences to catch up. Or, worse, the laws of physicis end up being such that the "next step" of experiments is simply outside the range of what we could conceivably build.

But on the other hand there are still unlimited opportunities for applied physics without having to go into more metaphysical fields. Material and energy research, optics...

I think we are still more or less brute forcing optimal lens setups for specific applications with complex simulators to fit specific applications. Useful to be a physicist in that case.

It seems so sensible compared to other theories but I don't hear much about it.

It would be nice to see something about this point in the essay.

IIRC that is only valid for a classic system.

[Disclaimer: I really really dislike superdeterminism. I just think that Cv is the wrong reason to dismiss it.]

Anyway I don't think I'm dismissing the idea of "superdeterminism". I'm only puzzled that directly measuring degrees of freedom, which was a central reason for adopting quantum mechanics, isn't even mentioned in an article where the public is being told there are fewer "real" degrees of freedom than generally thought.

I don't understand superdeterminism and I'm not qualified to dismiss it.

It seems the point of non-reductionism is that you can't propose such a theory.

For instance, if we were in a simulation that decides whether to optimize quantum to macroscopic transition based on what we're looking at, we're simply not going to find what causes wave functions to collapse because there isn't an underlying rule to find. We're "observers" just because we're flagged as such. For us in the simulation, certain things just happen for apparently arbitrary reasons because we can't peer into the source code.

It'd be like a character in an FPS trying to figure out why shooting breaks some things but others are indestructible.

So it's like the refresh rate of The Universe?

I just started watching DEVS on Hulu. Given your statement above you should check it out.

My understanding of superdeterminism doesn't necessarily rule out the multiverse theory. Maybe my idea of the multiverse theory isn't traditional but I think the universe can very well identically repeat and or repeat but be somewhat different by how forces can be occurring at different intervals than the past cycle of the universe.

edit: people downvote on this site because they don't like thinking of not having free will lol.

The reality is that a great many philosophers believe that determinism and free will are perfectly compatible. There is also supernatural defense of free-will, as in many religions (where the physical universe may well be deterministic, except for interaction with a spiritual world of will, which may produce physical effects without a physical cause). Both of these ideas are example of people who believe in free will even if they do understand (physical) determimism. There are probably other groups as well.

And yet compatibilism is a common philosophical belief ever since ancient times, supported throughout history by philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Thomas Aquinas, and Daniel Denett.

The essential idea is that what we understand by free will can exist even in a purely deterministic naturalistic universe - mostly, free will should be understood as the ability of any agent to act based on its motivations. So, for example, an artificial neural net is in some important sense free to act as it 'wills' to solve a problem, even though it is following its programming.

The agent cannot make decisions free of what the system has influenced. So, it still is nonsensical to think a person has free will in the traditional sense. People are not making their own decisions when they couldn't have been different from the result of the system they reside in. I do consider Schopenhauer a great philosopher but what most people think of free will isn't a possibility. Compatibilism isn't even worthwhile because it doesn't make determinism & free will compatible but instead just redefines free will to delude people into thinking traditional free will is a real thing.

But the compatibilist free will has most of the characteristics that we associate with any kind of free will. For example, there is still value in arguments, as hearing one agent's argument can well be the cause of the other agent's change in behavior. By the same token, it still makes sense to hold agents responsible for their actions and punish them for their decisions, since the cause of their behavior is very much related to their 'person', the sum total of what they have experienced, learned, and have projected about the future through their own rationality.

In fact, it's hard to find anything in the compatibilist free will that contradicts intuitive notions of free will, except for the most religious of intuitions, unless you push it to the brink and try to ask questions where we don't have good intuitions anyway, usually by asking counterfactuals, or moving to the relationship between free will and consciousness.

There is also another kind of approach to this question, one I first heard from Noam Chomsky. His point was: if determinism were to contradict our most immediate experience (as discussed before, it may not), the one of deciding how to interact with the world, wouldn't it make more sense to say that we are missing something from our scientific understanding in this area, rather than insisting that the most common empirical observation we have is completely wrong?

I'm sure some people read about compatiblism and shortly later go back to believing the traditional free will nonsense. I don't think many people think about not having free will for much time at all. Thinking about determinism for awhile makes it hard to not understand predeterminism. Progresses into making it fairly easy to understand we're just part of a complex system and the system works from a collective mesh of subsystems being "us" to the smallest thing.

We're similar to the concept of robots. The universe wrote code for the instructions of us. Similar, we made the robots "code" and people don't consider the robots having free will from our "human code" functioning the operating robots. When people have their thought on robots, they think of determinism subconsciously and think "no.., the actions are really from us, who coded & setup the robots" while the residing of the robots has environment external forces interacting with the robots' outcomes.

I personally think the world is good but resembles evil and overtime becomes less resembling evil. I further think the universe repeats more likely than not ever repeat throughout infinity. A good majority of people don't realize they don't have free will; that's keeping evil resembling experiences around longer on earth from what I observe and while people are punished severely. They're never being told they had no free will required to have a better outcome or being given the time observing how their mentality came to be that resulted in the bad outcome.

Most people don't even experience what the punishments are from unfavourable: genetics, financial status, health condition, and whatever life variable factoring into conflicting with the system of society; outcomming in not living a mediocre or higher status life but an awful one.

So yes, I get freaked out when I even observe all the travesties in society, that likely would have more empathy if people understood "success isn't earned" but given to you at birth and like everything else that follows after birth. Awareness of how the universe at the moment of the creation, resulted in the future (sad or happy) outcomes from the summation of sequential forces upon everything and then thinking of the more privileged vs misfortunate situations in comparison.

The forgoing makes me think the system of society would adapt to be more compassionate than the opposite incorrect belief of traditional free will. It's like when people thought it was better to think the world was flat. Delusion isn't better than realism. Eventually, leads me into thinking people can eventually be more likely to agree on universal healthcare and even futuristic things like universal income & homes.

So I think free will belief needs to be killed sooner than later. Even though whatever happens is what fate already decided on upon creation. So I'm somewhat hopeful people examine this topic.

However, I don't believe in full predetrminism, and you don't either. If you did, you would not think about improving the world, or convincing people of things - if you believe that the next speech by the president was determined at the time of the big bang, then thinking about change is meaningless, and none of us can help feel or not feel however we do.

However, if you believe in a world where the future has not happened yet and it evolves more like a complex computation, with room for changing program code by the program itself, perhaps even with some randomness thrown in, you get a fully naturalistic deterministic world where nevertheless you can try to influence things in some direction or another.

To articulate my own belief about this more clearly, I think the example of robots you gave is very good. I believe that even a robot with a simplistic machine learning algorithm can be meaningfully said to have a kind of free will, in that it can do a better or worse job at what it was designed to do based on the examples it is given and on accidents of its training process. Two such robots may well have different beliefs about the world (in a very basic sense)and they could even influence one another based on their experience (training set) and conclusions (parameters of their algorithm). This is how I believe humans and animals work as well - we have a pre-determined algorithm (vastly more complex), with different starting parameters between different people, we have a training set consisting of all of our lived experiences, and our algorithm can modify itself or its parameters during training, in pre-specified ways. This does end up meaning that some people end up with better models/algorithms than others, based on better starting conditions, or on more luck with experiences. And decision points in this algorithm are what I think represents our experience of free will.

I actually do believe in complete predeterminism.

Example: everything you & I wrote was fated to happen and similar to our thoughts on the subject. Multiple persons I've conversed with (even hard determinists) will express similar opinions as you "well then your thoughts on improvement don't matter because if the universe is functioning under under predeterminism, well it was fated to improve if it happens" and then try to use that assertion as an argument in some way to make a rhetoric against my personal thoughts or the discussion.

I personally, enjoy reading about what you wrote to me and similar to myself writing about the subject. Otherwise I'll never learn something new on the topic. I don't care knowing it's all fated and same are my thoughts on thinking the world slowly improves without me having a real will separate from the system.

My thoughts continue to be, I'm a person that enjoys learning about this topic and that requires conversing about it. I think the understanding of free will being an illusion, will one day improve society exponentially faster than a universe that didn't result in people coming to realization sooner. The majority of people just need to function with understanding of the illusion to the point of understanding complete predetermination.

> However, if you believe in a world where the future has not happened yet and it evolves more like a complex computation, with room for changing program code by the program itself, perhaps even with some randomness thrown in, you get a fully naturalistic deterministic world where nevertheless you can try to influence things in some direction or another.

My idea is that the universe is more probable to repeat than not repeat. I do have wishful thinking and it makes me agnostic. I like to think if there is a higher power that people typically name as a God. Well, God cannot do the impossible like making traditional free will be real. So, I like to think that the universe repeats with adjustments made after it runs its course. I take a position close to Einstein, such as once the universe iteration starts, God doesn't interfere, and I acknowledge that belief is impossible to prove. I only assume my thought on that are more probable from the horrible things that happen to people and this is under the assumption a higher power wouldn't want suffering in the complex system created. So again I think after universe runs the course for humanity, it will repeat and there will be adjustments so things improve for the previous stories the humans experienced.

The forgoing will now provide you with different thoughts on what I previously wrote. The last part of what you're expressing is how our brains function and we could describe nature similar to what we define as evolution. But I wouldn't say that's free will. My idea is free will isn't a possibility even if I die, ..the universe eventually repeats, and I live again from the recursion but with new improvements making everyone have a happier story; created from an higher power understands my desires in the previous life I lived. That's not anymore free will because every universe iteration would be fated from the previous summation of forces.

It's not the result of that experiment a proof that the photons are interfering with something?

You are right that in modern information theory exact precision on a continuum is physically impossible (for others: as we continue to subdevide the precision we require more bits of information, which has known physical limits).

But what I think the other posters was getting at is that if the universe runs on a machine that is not bound by those rules, say rules where arbitrary precision on a continuum can be stored as a value (which again violates physicality as we know it but such a machine is "outside" the universe so physicality is moot already), then that is possible.

Which is to say the universe is a machine which can compute things a Turing machine can't (a Turing machine can compute everything that can be computed that we are aware of, ergo if the universe can compute things it can't then the assertion being made - albeit somewhat clumsily - is that the universe doesn't follow the asserts we know).

However, I would argue that such a super-Turing machine is logically impossible. In principle continuous values cannot be physically manifested with certainty or arbitrary precision regardless of what world we are in.

Positing such a super-Turing machine is like saying "I have a square circle in my pocket".

I mean we are discussing it so it's certainly logically possible.

> In principle continuous values cannot be physically manifested with certainty or arbitrary precision regardless of what world we are in.

Why would they need to be physically manifestable? Again how can you make assertions about what parts of physicality are maintained by the machine that is computing physicality? How can you make assertions about the world containing our own?

> Positing such a super-Turing machine is like saying "I have a square circle in my pocket".

Except it isn't. It's more like "I launched my square circle beyond the observable universe". If it was in my pocket I could take it out and show it to you.

Positing a "super-Turing" machine is pointless because it isn't testable. But it is possible. I feel like that distinction is important which is why I commented. Which is much how I feel about super-determinism in general, sure it's possible, but how do we test it? It's pointless because whether not it exists doesn't change anything. The issue of the discrete values is an interesting facet of that, one that might lead to something testable, like those "is the universe a hologram" experiments. Establishing what would be required of such a system is useful, but it doesn't dismiss it out of hand.

I guess my issue is that your arguments don't fully embrace the theory so they are bit like trying to disprove the existence of a different god using the holy book of your own god. There are valid reasons to disagree with superdeterminism, but arguing from the lens of physicality misses the issue at hand.

Ugh. Is information theory mathematics or physics? Nature is analog and doesn't work in terms of bits, it's more similar to Euclidean geometry than Cartesian.

Both are absurd concepts! When probing the ultimate depths of reality like this there are no good answers.

I also think that light is not a wave and that light particles are not fired in a straight line in the double slit experiment; they are fired at an angle, and then they bounce off the slits and create the interference pattern; and when we put a detector in front of the slits, it only serves as creating new light particles that do not have this angle in them and they go straight ahead, making the diffraction pattern disappear.

And it's not that quantum math is wrong; it's right, but my intuition says that any system can be described by statistics.

As for quantum mechanics applications, all the applications mentioned (from clocks to computers to anything the article and other articles mention) are not based in any QM specific property. None of those applications are actually dependent on entanglement and on collapsing the wave function, and entanglement cannot be used for any application despite what they write in articles because it would violate the principles of relativity. And none of those applications would cease to exist if light was not an actual wave and photons simply moved in wave patterns.

Let the downvotes begin!

The truly interesting things discoveries within in the framework of quantum field theory, such as ADS/CFT, going from String Theory to low energy effective theories or the Amplituhedron. All of those have direct and immediate connections to state of the art quantum field theories.

What is done in (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06462.pdf), especially the last part, where they suddenly invoke p-adic numbers in support of a very vague argument and a cartoon of Penrose's impossible triangle in a similar vague manner, won't be taken serious by most physicists, but is sufficient apparently to convince non-technical people to continue funding them. Nautil.us probably is just grateful for the free content.

About your argument, as far as I know, the measurement problem is not solved in QFT. I have also never heard of adding a term to the Lagrangian to represent a measurement. The addition of the external field to hamiltonian of the atom when calculating the Zeeman effect is something unrelated to measurement afaik. If you have any references on your claims please point them out.

In a Bell test experiment, it's not just that the outcomes were predetermined, but that the brains of two experimenters, and their experimental setups, were configured in a very precise way to make them choose measurements that would yield compatible results. That is, it's not so much that you didn't really get to make a choice, but that it took such a complicated configuration in order to bring about a fairly simple result.

And since you can't know the entire configuration of a brain, you've really just replaced the randomness with a mystery box. Instead of "John chose freely to set the experiment to up/down", all you get is "John was fated from the beginning of time to set the experiment to up/down -- a thing I learned by watching John set the experiment to up/down". Instead of randomness or free will, all you get is a sage nod after the fact, "Yes, so was it foreordained in the before-times."

It's not impossible. I'm not even really sure it's implausible. It's just that it doesn't seem to inform anything.

If you however mean that any entire observable universe¹, if cosmic super-inflation is true, must be causally related and thus "pre"-determined, which may be qualified as "super"-determined in a way, then I agree (layman too).

--

[1]: Should we keep -c² as the metric of spacetime, i.e. no causality beyond the light boundary (function of time, in space).

Basically any interaction with some other particle causes that particle to become entangled as well, and so you very easily get "avalanches" of entanglement that spread at the speed of light.

As soon as the avalanches reaches "the observer", the observer themselves become entangled with the originally entangled particle, which means that from their perspective it looks as though they no longer are. This is similar to conditional probabilities.

To get back on the example of dices: we might be building a whole storytelling around "probabilistic dices" because we haven't formalized the concept of the hand behind, yet.

I've always pictured entanglement as totally acceptable if you postulate an extra dimension. Then you simply have to picture a link in that extra dimension between the particles, like a 'U' crossing flatland in two 'dots' (particles) would manifest as 'entanglement' for the flatlanders.

But I've really grown skeptical of all such interpretations now (mine very much included), I'd tell you honestly that I probably favor the one that seems most beautiful to me within the space of possibilities (which is what I care about and investigate, the pure science). Interpretation is belief, basically, even if your name is Schrödinger.

____

[1]: Even if eventually found to be partial as the article suggests, I think it's fair to assume any "new" quantum theory would be to QED/QCD what General Relativity was to Newton's equations of motion: precisely a generalization from which to derive Newton for small-ish quantities. Ergo, we can assume QM is 'True'.

Entanglement is unstable, and easily swamped. It doesn't go away, but it becomes a very small factor in things. If I had two entangled electrons, and added them to two coins, the two coins are now entangled. But if I flip them, I don't expect the results to be significantly correlated. The classical behavior of the coins massively swamps the entanglement.

So even if you and I were performing a Bell test experiment, and know that the atoms of your brain are somehow entangled to the atoms of mine dating back to the origin of the universe, it's still unreasonable to expect that to lead us to set up the equipment in such a way as to preserve the correlations between two entangled particles in our experiment. There's just too much brain matter, and too much has happened to it from the beginning of the universe until now, for that entanglement to make a difference.

What's lost in the process of burning that strawman, is that we can't ever have perfect knowledge of our environment or our nervous systems; and in a seeming paradox of determinism, a being who believes they have agency will behave differently than one who does not. Even if one accepts the model that we merely rationalize our subconscious choices (an imperfect model with some non-zero truth), the data from the outcome of that choice still feed into one's neural network and influence future choices, making the "free will software stack" a potentially valuable psycho-technology.

As a practical matter, I'm intrigued by the model that what we experience as consciousness, and the feeling of agency, really only has one knob to turn: what tiny fraction of our massive neural information network we orient the spotlight of our attention towards. That singular "decision" point, navigating what Buddhist cognitive scientist John Vervaeke calls the "salience landscape", has incredible potency on its own, iterated moment after moment for the entirety of a human lifespan.

It seems to me that any time you have a process that feeds the output into the input, then you can easily have a divergence of trajectory whose precision exceeds anything that could be explicitly stored in a finite universe.

So it seems to me that free will must exist in the sense that a simple system, let alone a brain, can produce information from somewhere that can't come from the limited universe we seem to inhabit. Like, take the Mandelbrot set as a simple proof of concept. It may not have all the things in it that are in the universe, but it seems to have more resolution, more components, than can exist in reality. So if you used it to feed a process, it can add something to the universe as it affects reality.

It implies that the universe is fine tuned to such a degree that everyone who's ever done an experiment which might disprove QM ever arrived at their n-sigma result did so by random chance.

The only way it could make even a lick of sense is if we're living in a simulation, and there's a little green man who's job it is to ensure we never disprove quantum mechanics.

The angle settings in a Bell test can come from basically anywhere. For example, you can point telescopes at opposite sides of the universe, feed the frames into a cryptographic pseudo random number generator, and use the output to decide the angles. For superdeterminism to be true, that would mean the initial state of the universe had to be such that millions of years later billions of stars on opposite sides of the universe would be in just the right configuration to make the SHA1 hash of a picture of them come out in a way that correlated in a simple way with the polarization angle of the photons you were generating locally. And then they'd also correlate for the next one. And the next one. And the next trillion after that. And also it has to be just right for all the other ways you can set up the angle selection.

I won't say it's literally impossible to satisfy that many constraints. There's a lot of degrees of freedom to work with, and only finitely many constraints before heat death. But it seems really really contrived to me. Like explaining why someone has rolled five hundred natural 20s with "Oh that's just how things were always going to play out" instead of "that seems suspicious. Let me see that die."

Based on Occam's Razor alone, modern DNN based models are complete garbage because of the amount of complexity involved in their models, yet they still hold useful predictive power.

Sometimes we have to throw out these general rules of thumbs and test the waters outside when we hit walls we can't seem to get around.

Interest and pursuit in the philosophy of science is something too largely brushed aside that, IMHO, needs an adrenaline shot these days. Unfortunately, few want to pursue that work because it doesn't pay the bills.

The mind consists of different parts. Imagine the act of choosing to eat a strawberry ice cream or a chocolate ice cream. You happen to like chocolate and dislike strawberries. If you could analyze the path electrons follow inside your brain, you could trace, even predict that you will choose chocolate ice cream.

Does it mean that you aren't free? I don't think so.

You might say that you aren't free to like chocolate and dislike strawberries. I'm not convinced either. There were foods I disliked (actually most of them) that I chose to get used to, and finally came to appreciate. So I can make myself freer.

For minor dayly things I may indulge in neurotic behaviours. But I can make most decisions rationally and usually do that when they're important enough for my life. As I grow older I have more control so I'm actually more predictable. Does it means that I'm less free now?

Where is the "you" in that equation?

See:

https://blog.rongarret.info/2018/01/a-multilogue-on-free-wil...

BTW, I also believe that it is a defensible position to say that the moon does not exist, but again, this is not an easy argument to make. See:

http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf (or the video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc )

https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.h...

There's a lot more where that came from if you're interested.

P.S. I love your handle! I see you created this account for the sole purpose of responding this comment. How did you even find this thread? It has been downvoted into oblivion.

I've watched your QM video several times and will do so many more I'm sure in hopes that someday I will understand it.

Heh. I wonder if I have any other secret followers on HN.

> in hopes that someday I will understand it.

Where did I lose you? Because that really was intended to be understandable by anyone with a high school algebra background.

I do think those who have a bias for materialism are overly eager to discard fuzzier subjectivities like free will, consciousness, even religious experiences and mystical states. There is obviously a sense in which Harry Potter is not real; but there is also a sense in which Harry Potter is more real than an arbitrary rock or tree, because as an ephemeral memeplex, that being altered planetary culture and created billions of dollars of economic activity. Just because a phenomenon lacks affordances for empirical measurement does mean it is necessarily absent from reality altogether.

For an opposing view to naive materialism which is still firmly nested in rationalist thinking, see Donald Hoffman's "The Case Against Reality": https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-aga...

In short, I believe what Planck found was not an action constant, but rather it was an energy constant. Planck's constant has the wrong units. The constant should be in Joules/oscillation as opposed to Joule*sec.

Planck inadvertently "hard coded" a one second measurement into his constant.

His equation should be E=htf where h is in Joules/oscillation t in seconds and f in oscillations/second. I think there is a reason why the units for frequency aren't explicitly listed as oscillations/sec. the units of E=hf don't balance if f has the units oscillations/second.

But you don't need to believe me... please read the following paper by Juliana H.J. Mortenson (Formerly Juliana H.J. Brooks). https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/e266e5e7-739c-437c-89c3-eed...

Can you find an error in her paper? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts! Thanks!

Upshot: Every oscillation of light has the same energy, and what we regard as a photon today is actually a one second measurement of oscillations of light at some frequency f.

Sure, just one you say? In Ch. 2 §1 Mortenson, MD tries to derive the "mean energy per oscillation". She refers to the dimensionless scalar "N" as the number of "waves" the photon is comprised of.

Not only doesn't that make any sense whatsoever, since a photon can only have a single frequency, and is hence described by a single wave. She also introduces a "unit" that doesn't exist - namely the "osc" (=oscillation), which is DIMENSIONLESS, i.e. it's doesn't have a physical representation and therefore cannot be unit...

She then continues to fail to apply the most basic dimensional analysis and I basically stopped right there.

It's a bunch of hogwash and esoteric pseudo-science, sorry.

The current interpretation of E=hf is what suggests that a photon is the elementary particle of light, and that a photon can only have a single frequency so I dont think that is a fair critique. She is trying to point out that E=hf and the current interpretation is wrong and is not assuming it's true in her analysis.

> DIMENSIONLESS

Although this is an aside to your point, can I hear your thoughts on using the dimensionless fine structure constant in equations?

Following your reasoning are we not allowed to use radians (an SI unit) in equations either?

If you want to prove an equation wrong, you cannot use it as a starting point. Let me show you the fundamental error she makes in detail:

E=hf

Dimensional analysis: J=J * s * s^-1=J * s / s=J * 1=J

So the original checks out ok.

The paper tries to argue that Js is the wrong unit for h and replaces the "1" from above with bogus "oscillations", which are never defined. The proper inverse of frequency is not "oscillations", however, it's period (singular!), which is measured in seconds.

Dividing by "oscillations" gives you the same unit you started with and changes nothing. This is independent of your interpretation of what a photon is. Since she also never specifies the relationship between "oscillations" and wavelength, I wonder how E=hc/λ follows, let alone the de Broglie wavelength...

> can I hear your thoughts on using the dimensionless fine structure constant in equations?

Using the fine structure constant in equations is equivalent to using pi in equations. Proportionality factors exist in nature.

Not for dimensional analysis.