Tim Maudlin
speaker
4,767 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 31 Aug
Tim Maudlin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And there was never a reason to believe it would work that way.
And if you deny that, then von Neumann's proof falls apart.
I mean, Bell also says at some point, you once you get your hands on on the theorem, it falls apart in your hands.
The story is, and then well, let me read this and then say a little more about Bell.
I myself, he says, did not know von Neumann's demonstration at first hand.
For the first time it was a for at that time it was available only in German, which I could not read.
However, I knew of it from the beautiful book by Bourne, Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance, which was in fact one of the highlights of my physics education.
Discussing how physics might develop, Bourne wrote, and now this is Bourne.
I expect that we shall have to sacrifice some current details uh to to use still uh and to use still more abstract methods.
However, these are only opinions.
A more concrete
Contribution to this question has been made by Jay van Neumann in his brilliant book Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik.
He puts the theory on an axiomatic basis by deriving it from a few postulates of a very plausible and general character about the properties of, quote, expectation values, averages, and their representation by mathematical symbols.
The result is that the formalism of quantum mechanics is uniquely determined by these axioms, in particular, and here's the main point of what Bourne is claiming.
No concealed parameters, no additional variables, no hidden variables can be introduced with the help of which the indeterministic description could be transformed into a deterministic one.
Hence, if a future theory should be deterministic, it cannot be a modification of the present one, but must be essentially different.
How this could be possible without sacrificing a whole treasure of well-established results, I leave to the determinists to worry about.
So notice it's not only determinism here.
Born is claiming that von Neumann has mathematically proven that no deterministic theory can make the same predictions as standard quantum mechanics.
And then Bell, now this is Bell again reporting.
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