Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · gr-qc/9406028

A Neglected Route to Realism About Quantum Mechanics

Huw Price
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Bell's Theorem assumes that hidden variables are not influenced by future measurement settings. The assumption has sometimes been questioned, but the suggestion has been thought outlandish, even by the taxed standards of the discipline. (Bell thought that it led to fatalism.) The case for this reaction turns out to be surprisingly weak, however. We show that QM easily evades the standard objections to advanced action. And the approach has striking advantages, especially in avoiding the apparent conflict between Bell's Theorem and special relativity. The second part of the paper considers the broader question as to why advanced action seems so counterintuitive. We investigate the origins of our ordinary intuitions about causal asymmetry. It is argued that the view that the past does not depend on the future is largely anthropocentric, a kind of projection of our own temporal asymmetry. Many physicists have also reached this conclusion, but have thought that if causation has no objective direction, there is no objective content to an advanced action interpretation of QM. This turns out to be a mistake. From the ordinary subjective perspective, we can distinguish two sorts of objective world: one "looks as if" it contains only forward causation, the other ``looks as if'' it involves a mix of backward and forward causation. This clarifies the objective core of an advanced action interpretation of QM, and shows that there is an independent symmetry argument in favour of the approach.

Explore related subjects

gr-qc

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Huw Price. 1994-06-17. A Neglected Route to Realism About Quantum Mechanics. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind%2F103.411.303

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Electrovacuum Black Hole Uniqueness

We prove the black hole uniqueness conjecture in the axially symmetric, stationary, electrovacuum setting, subject to the refined asymptotic analysis of the associated singular harmonic maps, which includes an analyticity hypothesis at the axes. More precisely, it is shown that any asymptotically flat solution of the Einstein--Maxwell equations in this class, with more than one black hole horizon component is either: Majumdar--Papapetrou, up to a duality rotation, in which case all logarithmic angle defects vanish, or every finite axis rod logarithmic angle defect is strictly negative and hence every interaction force is strictly attractive. The proof extends the singular harmonic map method used for vacuum Kerr uniqueness in [18].

gr-qc↗
arXiv2026

Constraining Modified Mass-to-Horizon Cosmology Through Primordial Inflationary Observables

We investigate slow-roll inflation in a modified cosmological framework inspired by a generalized mass-to-horizon relation (MHR), $M=\gamma {c^2 L^n}/{G}$, where $n$ is a real parameter and $\gamma$ a dimensional constant. Using Padmanabhan's emergence paradigm, we derive the modified Friedmann equations for a flat FRW universe and analyze the dynamics of a canonical scalar field (inflaton) under the slow-roll approximation. We study the resulting inflationary phenomenology for power-law and Starobinsky potentials. For power-law potentials, the MHR modification fails to reconcile these models with current CMB constraints on $r$ and $n_s$. In contrast, Starobinsky inflation exhibits significant sensitivity to deviations from $n=1$. A perturbative analysis ($n=1+\Delta$) yields corrections to inflationary observables. We observe that the scalar power-spectrum normalization, under a fixed-Starobinsky prescription, imposes the stringent constraint $0.960 \lesssim n \lesssim 1.040$ for $N=60$ efolds. This is considerably tighter than spectral-index bounds. Our results establish inflation, particularly Starobinsky-like models, as a sensitive probe of generalized horizon thermodynamics and departures from standard MHR scaling.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2026

Improving the Sensitivity of Gravitational Wave Detection with Weighted Conformal Prediction

In the last decade, kilometre-scale interferometric gravitational-wave detectors have observed hundreds of compact binary mergers, the majority of which are binary black holes. However, the data are noise-dominated, and multiple independent search algorithms (pipelines) are used to enhance sensitivity and improve robustness. Rather than the standard approach of selecting the most significant pipeline output, we combine the outputs from all pipelines using a conformal prediction-based framework to provide statistically rigorous confidence estimates for candidate events. While combining pipelines improves sensitivity and ranking robustness, it requires a principled statistical framework that remains valid as data properties evolve across observing runs. A key challenge is distribution shifts between simulated datasets used for training and calibration and the real, unlabelled, observations used for testing, which can invalidate coverage guarantees and bias confidence estimates. In this work, we address this challenge by incorporating likelihood-ratio reweighting into our conformal prediction framework to account for covariate shift. Using mock datasets containing simulated signals, we demonstrate that weighted conformal prediction restores well-calibrated coverage under covariate shift and increases the confidence of events near the detection threshold, recovering true signals that would otherwise be missed.

gr-qc↗