Joke: They thought he was a !!!"theoretical"!!! physicist.

Sadly it's all nonsense. If Einstein was alive today he would denounce special relativity. Modern day physics has devolved into a religious cult. Yes, please read Einstein, because everyone lies about what he believed and does not represent his concerns with modern physics accurately.

When Einstein introduced his theory of relativity in 1905, it made zero new predictions, because it was mathematically equivalent to a theory Lorentz presented in 1904. Einstein's critique of Lorentz's theory was simply that it contained a privileged reference frame, these days called a preferred foliation, which was undetectable. If you can't detect it, it is redundant for experimental predictions, and so it should be thrown out. This gives you a different mental picture to what is going on, since Lorentz's theory was one of absolute spacetime where deviations in rods and are clocks are treated as deviations in rods and clocks from absolute time due to physical effects. If I mess with your clock so it runs slower, that doesn't prove time slows down. Einstein's theory, by dropping the postulate that there exists a preferred foliation, drops the concept of absolute time, and this inevitably leads you to the conclusion that time and space really do deviate.

Good. Einstein removed something unnecessary for predictions. What is the problem? The problem is that in 1964 the physicist John Bell published a paper proving that special relativity simply lacks sufficient structure to take into account objective reality when factoring in quantum mechanical predictions. Bell's theorem has nothing to do with determinism as it is often misunderstood. When Bell talked about "hidden variables" he was not talking about some additional hidden parameter that would make quantum theory deterministic. He was talking about the very concept of object permanence, the basis of philosophical realism.

If I observe an object at time t=0, t=1, and then again at t=2, then run the entire experiment again from the beginning with the same initial conditions and observe the object at t=0 and t=2 but not t=1, clearly, this time I didn't observe it at t=1, but that was just by happenstance. I could have counterfactually observed it at t=1, and I know, from other experiments, that I would perceive something there if I looked at t=1 under this counterfactual, even though I just so happened not to. We thus must conclude that the system has an observable property at t=1, even though we did not observe, because we could have under a counterfactual.

This is the bedrock of philosophical realism, the very notion of objective reality, that things exist when we are not looking as long as you can make an argument that they could be observed under some counterfactual. Directly being observed in the present moment is not necessary to say it exists. Even if I cannot see you right now, I can still believe you exist in objective reality because I can imagine a counterfactual scenario where I do observe you, such if you were my friend and invited me over.

When Bell was talking about "hidden variables," this is what he was talking about: the idea that particles can be considered to have physical properties even when you are not looking at them. These properties are sometimes called in the literature the "ontic state." The ontic state may evolve deterministically, or in a way that is fundamentally random. It does not matter. The notion of philosophical realism is that systems possess ontic states when you are not looking at them and then these ontic states explain what shows up on your measurement device when you look.

What Bell demonstrates in his 1964 paper is that special relativity does not have sufficient structure to include the ontic states of particles when you factor in the statistical predictions of quantum mechanics. There is thus an incompatibility between objective reality and special relativity. It turns out that the exact additional structure you need is the preferred foliation, which was originally deleted by Einstein. But if you read Einstein's work, his main concern of Bohr's interpretation of quantum theory was not lack of determinism, but lack of realism. He gave an example of atomic decay, where if you leave a radioactive atom in a box to decay and a certain amount of time has passed, it must have emitted or not emitted a particle within that time frame. It must have done one or the other, but Bohr's interpretation did not allow you to admit that it did, because that is equivalent to adopting an ontic state for the atom in the box.

When encountered with the contradiction between special relativity and objective reality, physicists chose to abandon objective reality. That is religion. Not science. The Copenhagen interpretation then became dominant, which argues physics is not about reality but purely about what shows up on measuring devices, but can say nothing about reality independently of what you measure. And don't even get me started on Many Worlds which is a cope that tries to find a middle ground by claiming the abstract mathematical realm used to predict what shows up on measuring devices is the objective reality, devolving into a logically incoherent Platonism.

It's clearly a religious cult as no evidence was needed to even establish this position. Niels Bohr convinced physicists to adopt the Copenhagen interpretation at the Solvay conference in 1927. This was decades prior to the publication of Bell's theorem, and even more decades prior before the Nobel prize was given for confirming Bell's theorem. Almost a century prior before Bell's theorem was experimentally verified, the physics community already decided objective reality doesn't exist.

Part of this nonsense comes back to Occam's razor. Occam's razor only makes sense as a principle if we just so happen to be lucky to be born into a universe without any physical redundancies. If there are any physical redundancies in the physical world itself, then the mathematical description of the world will also contain mathematical redundancies. If you then remove the mathematical redundancies, you then have an incorrect picture of the world, even though it still technically makes the right predictions. Physicists have taken Occam's razor to such an extreme that they have found that they can remove objective reality from the mathematics and only care about what shows up on measuring devices and make the right predictions.

They then go around lying and in indoctrination people into their superstition that this is how we should really think, that we should really believe that there is no cat in the box until you open the lid and look, or even that time and space are unquestionably fundamentally relative, and if you don't believe these things unquestionably then you are a "science denier," even though there is not a shred of empirical evidence for them. Special relativity never once made a single original prediction that could be verified in experiment which was not already predicted by Lorentz's theory, and taking it too seriously forces you to drop belief in the very existence of an objective reality independent of observation/measurement, or devolve into incoherent talk about objective reality being the Platonic realm of the pure mathematics itself, as if we all live inside of a giant invisible infinite-dimensional wave.

If Einstein saw Bell's theorem he would have renounced his own theory of special relativity as Einstein was a committed realist. He falsely believed he could make realism compatible with relativistic locality, and there is just no way he would have opted to deny the very existence of objective reality if he saw Bell prove that these views are fundamentally incompatible. He would have conceded that special relativity does indeed need additional structure and that removing it was a mistake. We already know that the objectively real universe in the real world has a preferred foliation and we have measured it, and so the idea that it is so absurd to think one exists when it is necessary to make the empirical evidence consistent with a model of objective reality is rather unconvincing.

All of the supposed "quantum weirdness" stems from this obsession with refusing to add back the structure needed to make quantum theory into a realist theory. When you add the structure back, you can then fit the empirical predictions of relativistic quantum mechanics to a theory of point particles moving in Newtonian spacetime. You end up with a picture that is actually coherent and comprehensible. But a regular old boring realist theory of nature doesn't sell books or get clicks on articles. You gotta keep brainwashing people into believing that physics is "weird" to keep the money flowing, and painting everyone who disagrees as "science deniers" even though we all agree on the same empirical evidence and no one is calling that into question.

But why then had Born not told me of this "pilot wave?" If only to point out what was wrong with it? Why did von Neumann not consider it? More extraordinarily, why did people go on producing "impossibility" proofs, after 1952, and as recently as 1978? When even Pauli, Rosenfeld, and Heisenberg, could produce no more devastating criticism of Bohm's version than to brand it as "metaphysical" and "ideological?" Why is the pilot wave picture ignored in text books? Should it not be taught, not as the only way, but as an antidote to the prevailing complacency? To show that vagueness, subjectivity, and indeterminism, are not forced on us by experimental facts, but by deliberate theoretical choice?

John Bell