From Newsgroup: sci.physics

In sci.physics.relativity, guido wugi <wugi@brol.invalid> wrote or quoted: >Long before our scientist has opened the box or told his friend, the

cat, and flask, and hammer, and Geiger counter, have each already (or
not) suffered interaction and "know" their state, each from its own >wavefunction as it were.

So in this setup, that state would count as a "hidden parameter". But
quantum mechanics doesn't allow for those, at least not if you stick
to its usual assumptions.

The thing is, quantum mechanics keeps pumping out results that pret-
ty much mess with our normal idea of cause and effect. For a long
time, people thought maybe there were unseen "hidden variables" be-
hind the scenes, quietly deciding what actually happens in those
quantum experiments - like maybe all the weirdness was just because
we were missing some info. But experiments based on Bell's inequal-
ities and the Kochen-Specker theorem have pretty much ruled that
out. You just can't build any local or non-contextual hidden-vari-
able model that nails everything quantum mechanics predicts.

Still, those results depend on the assumptions you make. Bell's in-
equalities knock out local hidden variables - stuff that acts indepen-
dently at each spot - when the correlations between particles go past
a certain point. And yeah, that's been backed up again and again in
loophole-free tests. The Kochen-Specker theorem kills off the idea
of non-contextual hidden variables, meaning measurement results can't
be locked in ahead of time without considering how you're measuring.
So the only way hidden-variable theories survive is by ditching lo-
cality, realism, or non-contextuality - like in "contextual" models or
straight-up non-local takes such as Bohmian mechanics.


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