The Last Loophole in Bell's Theorem? A prima facie problem with superdeterminism

TL;DR

This paper examines whether the correlations observed in Bell test experiments could have a local deterministic explanation, challenging the common interpretation that these results imply quantum nonlocality.

Contribution

It critically analyzes the possibility of superdeterminism as a local explanation for quantum correlations, highlighting conflicts with quantum indeterminacy and noncommutativity.

Findings

Superdeterminism faces fundamental conflicts with quantum indeterminacy.

Entanglement does not necessarily imply nonlocality under local deterministic models.

Cosmological implications of superdeterminism are briefly discussed.

Abstract

Hance and Hossenfelder recently claim that the extensive experimental confirmations of Bell's Theorem do not in fact demonstrate that nature is nonlocal, but merely that nature can be local only if the distant detector settings in a Bell-EPR setup are not statistically independent. They suggest that such interdependence could take a local-deterministic form. There is no question that in general quantum mechanics not only allows but demands that the distant detectors be entangled and thus correlated, even though it is possible to do experiments in which such correlations can be ignored. The real question is whether entanglement itself could have a deterministic explanation. We review why any such attempted deterministic underpinning for quantum statistics would run into immediate conflict with quantum indeterminacy and the noncommutativity upon which the latter is based. Some cosmological implications are briefly explored.