Jonathan Ingles: You know what genuinely surprised me this week — Einstein said 'God does not play dice,' and I'd always treated that as the grieving old physicist who couldn't handle the new physics. But that's not what's going on, is it.
Ben Okonkwo: No — and honestly, it's a bit of a lazy read. He wasn't just being sentimental. He was pointing at something specific: that the Copenhagen Interpretation, this idea that quantum outcomes are irreducibly probabilistic with nothing underneath, felt to him like an incomplete picture. And he had company.
Jonathan Ingles: De Broglie.
Ben Okonkwo: Right — so, Louis de Broglie in 1927 at the Solvay Conference proposed what we'd now call pilot-wave theory. The idea being: there's a real wave in the physics, and it's guiding the particle along a precise trajectory. Randomness isn't fundamental — it's just what happens when you don't know the initial conditions. Think about it like... you're watching that coin spin and you have no idea what force launched it, so you call it fifty-fifty. But it isn't. The physics already knows the answer.
Jonathan Ingles: That's the hidden-variable idea — outcomes fully specified, just hidden from us.
Ben Okonkwo: Exactly that. And de Broglie had this worked out mathematically in 1927. Einstein was in that room. And the field — I mean, not all at once, but over the next few years — settled into the Copenhagen view instead. Not because pilot-wave theory was refuted. More because of how the intellectual culture moved.
Jonathan Ingles: So pilot-wave theory was there from the start — it wasn't invented later as a workaround?
Ben Okonkwo: It was there from the start — and that's what makes the next part so uncomfortable. Because the field didn't just drift away from it. It got a mathematical door slammed in its face. Von Neumann, 1932, publishes a formal proof: hidden-variable theories are impossible. Mathematically ruled out. And that proof gets cited for roughly ninety years as the reason you don't need to take de Broglie seriously.
Jonathan Ingles: Ninety years.
Ben Okonkwo: Ninety years. And then — Bricmont in 2023, and separately a 2025 pedagogical paper — both go back and show the proof rests on an assumption that doesn't bind nonlocal frameworks. Von Neumann assumed, essentially, that hidden variables have to behave a certain way at the level of measurement outcomes. De Broglie-Bohm theory doesn't claim that. The proof was never aimed at the right target.
Jonathan Ingles: So the gatekeeping mechanism — the reason grad students were steered away from pilot-wave theory for decades — was a proof that didn't actually gate what everyone thought it gated.
Ben Okonkwo: That is — yeah, that's the precise framing. And I want to be careful not to overstate it, because the proof wasn't fraudulent. Von Neumann wasn't wrong about his math. The problem is more that the scope got inflated somewhere in transmission, and nobody — I mean, nobody prominent — pressed on that assumption hard enough to catch it until very recently.
Jonathan Ingles: The assumption that no one bothered to flag. That's institutional failure, not scientific disagreement.
Ben Okonkwo: Hm. I'd say it's both. But here's what anchors this as more than just a specialist argument — there's a 2022 Foundations of Physics special issue, foreworded by Aurélien Drezet, specifically gathering contemporary work on the de Broglie-Bohm legacy. That's a peer-reviewed venue treating this as live scholarly debate. Not fringe.
Jonathan Ingles: But still specialist. It's not like the Copenhagen consensus cracked open.
Ben Okonkwo: No — not yet. What Bohm actually built in the 1950s was a fully deterministic framework consistent with every quantum prediction. It wasn't defeated. It was dismissed on the basis of a proof that, it turns out, didn't apply to it. That gap — between 'not refuted' and 'not taken seriously' — is where the interesting question lives.
Jonathan Ingles: But that gap — 'not refuted, not taken seriously' — Bell is supposed to be where that ends, right? People cite Bell as the thing that finally closed the file.
Ben Okonkwo: Right — and here's the slippery part. Bell's 1964 theorem closed the file on *local* hidden variables. Meaning: no theory where particles carry pre-set instructions that only use information local to them can reproduce all quantum predictions. That part, experiments have confirmed. Decisively. But pilot-wave theory — de Broglie-Bohm — is explicitly nonlocal. Bell knew this. He wasn't claiming to have ruled it out.
Jonathan Ingles: So Bell's theorem gets cited as closing the hidden-variable debate, and it didn't even aim at pilot-wave theory.
Ben Okonkwo: It redistributed the problem. Nonlocality is still there — entangled particles correlating at a distance in ways no local pre-shared information explains. Pilot-wave theory doesn't hide from that, it just... builds it in. The pilot wave is itself nonlocal. And then there's superdeterminism, which is the actually radical move — it says the reason Bell tests seem to rule things out is that they rest on an assumption we haven't earned. Statistical independence: that experimenters' measurement settings are uncorrelated with the hidden variables of the particles. Superdeterminism just denies that. Everything — including which button the experimenter presses — was fixed by prior causes.
Jonathan Ingles: Wait — so the entire experimental framework assumes we can freely choose our settings?
Ben Okonkwo: That is exactly the assumption. And Bell himself flagged what it means if you drop it — in a 1985 BBC interview, he said if superdeterminism is true, human behavior, including our belief that we are free to choose, would be absolutely predetermined. That's not my framing. That's Bell, on camera.
Jonathan Ingles: I mean — that's not a physics result anymore. That's Bell saying the theory eats itself.
Ben Okonkwo: Hm — well, it's technically consistent with every experiment ever run. No test has ruled it out, because no test *can* rule it out if your choices are already baked in. Whether that makes it science or a philosophical escape hatch is... actually, that's the live question. And it connects to something we haven't touched yet — because the way the free-will framing lands in public coverage, including what BBC Science Focus did with this, turns out to be more scrambled than either side admits.
Jonathan Ingles: No, I don't buy that superdeterminism is just a logical curiosity. If it's true, the physicist designing the Bell test to disprove it was always going to design that test. The refutation was predetermined. That's not science. That's a closed loop.
Ben Okonkwo: Right — but that closed-loop problem is actually what unlocks the free will piece, because here's where the public framing goes completely sideways. People assumed quantum randomness was the fix — if outcomes aren't determined, then choices can be genuine. But random isn't chosen. A radioactive atom decaying at a statistically unpredictable moment isn't exercising agency. Libertarian free will needs undetermined *choices*, not undetermined dice rolls.
Jonathan Ingles: So quantum indeterminism doesn't actually rescue free will. It just moves where the randomness lives.
Ben Okonkwo: And pilot-wave theory doesn't simply kill it either — I mean, the mapping from quantum-level determinism to macro human decisions is genuinely contested. It's not a straight line. You'd need to show how subatomic rules propagate up through neurons and, I don't know, the moment someone decides to quit their job. Nobody's done that.
Jonathan Ingles: Okay but that's exactly what the BBC Science Focus piece obscured — right? This is where the coverage broke down.
Ben Okonkwo: The claim is that article sparked significant debate on X. Interesting — because I genuinely cannot find it. No high-engagement expert pushback, no endorsement thread from the relevant period. Either it generated heat somewhere I'm not seeing, or the cultural moment being described didn't actually happen.
Jonathan Ingles: At minimum we should hedge that. And here's what bothers me — Penchev in 2020 claims experiments confirmed the absence of hidden variables. Bricmont in 2023 looks at the same experimental record and says de Broglie-Bohm isn't refuted. Same experiments. Opposite conclusions. That tension almost never surfaces in mainstream coverage.
Ben Okonkwo: Because the coverage wants a verdict.
Jonathan Ingles: The coverage always wants a verdict. Picture a physics PhD student — she reads the BBC Science Focus piece between seminars, gets genuinely excited, messages her advisor. And the advisor replies: pilot-wave is mathematically consistent, yes, but career-adjacent to mainstream work — finish your Copenhagen-flavored chapter first. That's the actual transmission mechanism. Not refutation. Redirection.
Ben Okonkwo: And she probably finishes the chapter. Which is — I mean, that's not malicious. That's just how incentive structures preserve themselves. Bell said in 1985 that superdeterminism makes free experimental choice incoherent, and even he framed that as a philosophical stakes question, not a settled answer. We're still in that room.
Jonathan Ingles: Einstein said God does not play dice. And we've spent ninety years building tests to prove him wrong — tests that, it turns out, rest on an assumption he might have denied from the start.
Ben Okonkwo: Statistical independence. The whole apparatus assumes it. And if superdeterminism is even possibly true, we've been using the answer to find the answer. I mean — I don't know what you do with that, scientifically.
Jonathan Ingles: That's a strange place to be.
