Physics has three important postulates:

(1) The speed of light is invariant
(2) Quantum randomness is pure
(3) Quantum states live outside 3d-space

My opinion is that, however a new theory might look like, the above three will remain as they are accepted now. So says my magic looking glass.

Those postulates are based on empirical evidence in the laboratory. Especially in randomness postulate (2), a.k.a. the Born-rule, the “pure” assumption is based on the painstaking exclusion of many conceivable alternatives.

Out of those postulates follows the theorem that there is no signal faster than light. No tachyons allowed. This is because from the constant-speed postulate (1) it follows that tachyons can be used to send data into the past. And sending into the past violates the “pure” in postulate (2).

At least that is how I interpret “pure” in randomness: without possible past explanation, in principle unpredictable, in no case exists a beforehand explanation within the state of the universe.

The constant-speed postulate (1) was accepted by 1920. The randomness postulate (2) took form after 1930. Did people in the 1920th think that tachyon signalling faster than light was possible? I guess not. Why? Because they chose to believe in free will. Only with pure determinism there are no contradictions arising from the possibility to send signals into the past. Anything better than determinism in the roaring 20s, certainly the impossibility of faster than light phoning was acceptable.

Einstein did not believe in free will. But because of his insistence on locality, he did not believe in supraluminal signalling either. In 1916 he introduced random spontaneous emission. I make the preposterous claim that Einstein introduced the dice in physics to save locality.

To explain non-local entanglement, postulate (3) is necessary. Exactly because it proposes an entity that lives outside 3d-space, this postulate cannot be tested directly in the laboratory. Einstein did not like this spooky stuff, but to this day no alternative to postulate (3) has been found to explain laboratory-observed entanglement.

Now I’d like to make a move Einstein would not have liked either: add free-will to the postulate mix and remove the original meaning of “pure”. Because if we decide to not only allow laboratory reports but also allow as evidence the consistent reports about inner states of human beings, we very well can postulate fundamental free will.

The assumption of a free will for certain states attached to human beings is based on painstaking exclusions of many conceivable alternatives. The additional assumption of “fundamental”, i.e. that will-carrying states live outside of 3d-space (and thus humans), is a daring extension of spooky postulate (3).

However, the postulate of fundamental free-will can be used to explain the “pure” behaviour of observed randomness. The painstaking search for alternatives to the “pure” in postulate (2) can in this light be seen as a fundamental search of free will to find itself.

So, I do not know if I have free will. Nor do I worship free will. I am well aware that Hegel saw the villain Napoleon as personified Weltgeist. But I want an explanation for Child-Mozart’s autograph score. Or deBroglie’s search for his wave-length.

Appendix

The postulate of fundamental free-will is certainly daring. For some it may be preposterous as a part of physics because it adds an esoteric flavour into the mix.

The current mainstream of scientific method is indeed more down to earth. I’d like to sketch it on the example of the Helium atom.

One starts with the classical theory. Two bodies (“electrons”) orbiting a centre of attraction, whether the force being either gravity or electrostatics does not change the math.

Then one inspects the spectrum of light emitted by Helium and realises that this spectrum does not match the classical calculation. A new idea is needed. A new postulate.

To get to the new postulate, one recognises that, in order to produce the spectrum of Helium, we were using two parts: first the light-emitting gas of Helium itself and second a glass prism to produce, out of this light, the spectrum.

The new postulate now is this: whatever the new theory explaining the Helium will be, this new theory will also explain the run-of-the-mill behaviour of the prism (the “Apparatus”).

We know that the Apparatus keeps working like any other object, being it an O-ring of our vacuum chamber, the handbook describing it or the cat strolling unter the library table. Quantum mechanics makes the postulate that the run-of-the-mill behaviour of the Apparatus can (with enough computer power) be explained.

And indeed, this is a very sensible postulate, as past empirical facts do not change when a new theory appears. Maybe we get a better explanation, but the run-of-the-mill observations remains the same. This is the necessary firm ground to discuss a shaky new theory.

We bought this firm ground by first recognising that not only the Helium but also the glass lens is an integral part of the problem. And by demanding a full calculation only for the Helium but merely a postulate for the lens, we introduce a cut between those two integral parts.

We postulate that the future involved computation for the Apparatus will indeed explain its run-of-the-mill behaviour, and that with the crucial addition that the new theory can do only approximately so. There are always error bars in any calculation as well as observation. We will forever be content with explaining the lens only approximately, for now using the classical theory, feeling like Christmas+Easter when eventually getting a half as good approximation from the new theory. For the lens, we do not need more and we do not hope for more.

Now that we have this sorted out, we draw our attention to the Helium. The procedure is to take the classical calculation for the Helium and apply to it a mathematical transformation to improve it. We “quantise the theory”. To do so, the colours emitted by the lens need to be interpreted as energies. In this way, the lens sets the stage for the quantisation transformation to be the energy-coordinate system. There are other experiments, other setups, which demand the use of their own coordinate-base for doing such mathematical transformation, the most prominent one being the impulse-base. This shows again that the Apparatus is an integral part of any quantum problem.

In this described way, we can explain the observed spectrum of our system Helium+lens. This works so well that we sometimes forget about all theses stages and speak only of the Helium.

You might compare it to the naive belief that noise is a necessary side effect of any collision of two objects. This is a false belief; if two objects collide in a vacuum, there will be no noise at all. The error stems from attributing the noise exclusively to the collision, and not recognizing the role of the medium, which carries it from the objects to the ear.

Nontheless, speaking only of Helium makes a lot of sense, for example in chemistry. Indeed this attitude only makes further communication about molecules feasible in the first pace.

But also a lens consists of atoms. And so we try to move the so called Heisenberg cut, the one which is so clear in spectroscopy and chemistry. We do many body quantum mechanics for which, and that is the bad news, we do not have a clear solution. State of the art is density operator theory. The main problem of course is the preferred base. What makes the lens set the energy (and not momentum) as a base? Answer: the classical-postulate, which, to be sure, for all practical purposes can now be given a very precise mathematical formulation. We got far but not quite to the finish.

There is no doubt that, for a lens, the end result will be classical physics. Whether refining current methods finally leads to that result in a conclusive way remains an open question. Until then we need to formulate the end result as a postulate. The mainstream is down to earth and sensible: Classical physics is a postulate of quantum mechanics.

Remark

If, for some quantum theory, we try to make a relativistic version of classical mechanics the postulate, we immediately hit a brick wall: we do not possess one. To quote Goldstein: “Except for a few special cases, there does not exist a satisfactory description of relativistic classical mechanics for interacting many particle systems.”

Albeit we do not possess a relativistic classical (RC) mechanics, it is not that we do not have any RC theory: we have Maxwells Electromagnetism. This is because the according quanta, the light particles or photons, are bosons. They tend to move in tandem and thus show their characteristic behaviour in a way which is measurable by, say, an antenna Tesla already built in 1893.

The only case for a classical limit of quantum theory that we currently possess is inherently relativistic.

So we indeed do have an RC theory for phenomena that are brought about by bosons, but we do not have an RC mechanics (RCM) for phenomena that are brought about by fermions. Maybe it is impossible to construct one? Maybe our unrelative classical mechanics (SICM), existing since 1687, is the best we can get in terms of sanity? Maybe an RCM would look as wired or even more wired than quantum mechanics? Maybe we would have decades of debates what the mathematics of an RCM means? Maybe an RCM triggered, like the quantum does, all this talk of, say, retrocausality, many worlds, Mach principle and what not?

Already the time dilation of the current one-particle version of RCM is on the one hand rock-hard real and at the same time unfathomable. Let’s assume that a future many-particle RCM is empirically tested but completely and utterly unfathomable. Then I cannot help but conclude that the SICM picture of stable objects, i.e. the causality of rigid bodies with a centre of mass, is fathomable only because it is a pure construct of our consciousness. I conclude that SICM is fathomable because we are deluded (a.k.a insane).

From this “completely insane” point of view, we will never be able to explain SICM out of the reasonable mathematical formulae of quantum mechanics. This is because our experience with relativity leads to the conclusion that the objects of SICM are pure constructs of our consciousness. The conjecture is that we will never be able to pinpoint the reason for the preferred energy basis in the density operator theory without adding an element of human delusion (a.k.a. sanity).

If some relativistic quantum formalism (the more wired is looks the better) explains the helium spectrum and the reason why we cannot send signals faster than light and the appearance of rigid bodies, then I will join the camp which expects consciousness to emerge out of complex material.

The mere handwaving note that “it necessarily needs to because it is fundamental” will not do.

Until the mathematical necessity of rigid bodies is shown, I wave my hand and assume the ecstatic truth that we need to add some element of fundamental consciousness to quantum theory in order to reach SICM, our sane and insane classical mechanics.