we already knew you’d click this
quick question before we start: did you choose to read this, or was that decision made 13.8 billion years ago at the exact moment of the big bang?
this isn’t fringe internet nonsense, it’s a real position held by actual physicists, including a nobel laureate. it has a name. it’s called superdeterminism, and it might be the most quietly unsettling idea in modern physics.
let’s open your eyes.
the setup: quantum mechanics has a “free choice” problem
back in 1935, einstein and two colleagues (podolsky and rosen, together the “epr” in epr paradox) pointed out something weird about quantum mechanics: it seemed to require what einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance.” two particles, entangled, somehow correlated no matter how far apart you separate them.
einstein hated this. he thought there had to be some deeper, deterministic layer (aka hidden variables) we j weren’t seeing yet. that would explain the correlation without any spooky nonsense.
in 1964, physicist john bell built a mathematical test called bell’s theorem to actually check if hidden variables could explain what quantum mechanics predicts. decades of real experiments later (the kind that won the 2022 nobel prize in physics), the results kept coming back the same way: no local hidden variable theory can explain what we observe. reality, at the quantum level, is not locally deterministic.
case closed, right? nature is weird, spooky action is real, move on.
except there’s one loophole bell himself admitted he couldn’t rule out.
the loophole nobody wants to talk about
bell’s whole proof assumes something called “free choice” that the physicist running the experiment can freely and randomly choose how to set up their detectors, completely independent of whatever’s happening with the particles.
seems obvious, right? you just… pick a setting. free will. easy.
but what if you couldn’t actually pick freely? what if the setting you “chose,” the particle’s behavior, and literally everything else in the experiment were all already locked in, correlated from a single common cause stretching all the way back to the beginning of the universe?
that’s superdeterminism. and it’s a real, still-debated escape hatch from bell’s theorem. if superdeterminism is true, quantum mechanics doesn’t need to be spooky or nonlocal at all. it just needs the universe to be one single, unbroken deterministic chain; and every “random” choice anyone ever makes, including which button a physicist presses in a lab, was baked in from the start.
a nobel laureate actually believes this
this isn’t some guy w/a blog (no offense to us taken). gerard ‘t hooft, who won the nobel prize in physics in 1999, has spent years developing what he calls the “cellular automaton interpretation” of quantum mechanics, a fully deterministic model where the appearance of quantum randomness is just what determinism looks like from the inside, the same way a complex enough computer program can look “random” without actually rolling any dice.
physicist sabine hossenfelder has become one of superdeterminism’s loudest public defenders, arguing it’s not just a way to dodge spooky action. it might be the key to finally reconciling quantum mechanics with general relativity, something physics has failed to do for a century.
their critics call it unfalsifiable or a “get out of jail free” card that lets you believe whatever you want about hidden correlations since you can never fully rule them out. that’s a fair hit. superdeterminism is genuinely controversial within physics itself, not just among the public. we’re not telling you it’s settled science. we’re telling you it’s a real, live argument happening in actual physics journals right now.
the counter-punch: the “free will theorem”
here’s where it gets fun. in 2006, mathematicians john conway and simon kochen published something they called the free will theorem, and it argues almost the exact opposite conclusion.
their proof: if human experimenters have even a tiny sliver of genuine free will — meaning their choices aren’t a pure function of the past. then, under the same quantum mechanics and relativity we all agree on, individual particles must have that same kind of freedom too. not consciousness, not a mind, but a response that genuinely isn’t determined by anything that came before it.
so you’ve got two groups of serious physicists and mathematicians, both working from the same experimental data, landing in completely opposite places:
- superdeterminism: nothing is free. the universe is one long, unbroken chain of cause and effect, and “choice” is an illusion baked in since the big bang.
- the free will theorem: if you have any freedom at all, so does every particle you’ve ever measured.
both can’t be true. and nobody’s proven either one wrong.
so… were you always going to read this?
we’re not going to tell you which side to land on. the point is that “is the universe predetermined down to the atom” isn’t a stoner dorm-room question anymore. it’s an open, live debate happening among people with nobel prizes and published proofs, and most people have no idea it’s even happening.
that’s kind of the whole thesis of this blog, isn’t it? the biggest questions rarely make headlines. they just sit in journals and lecture halls while everyone else scrolls past.
open your eyes. and if you figure out whether you actually chose to, let us know in the comments. or don’t. maybe that was never up to you either.
sources & further reading: bell, j.s. (1964); conway, j. & kochen, s., “the free will theorem,” foundations of physics (2006); ‘t hooft, g., cellular automaton interpretation of quantum mechanics; hossenfelder, s. & palmer, t., writings on superdeterminism.