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Antony Valentini, "Beyond the Quantum: A Quest for the Origin and Hidden Meaning of Quantum Mechanics" (Oxford UP, 2026)
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Gregory McNiff
Welcome to the New Books Network
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Antony Valentini
welcome
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Gregory McNiff
to the New Books Network. I'm your host Gregory McNiff, and I'm excited to be joined by Antony Valentini, the author of beyond the Quantum A Quest for the Origin and Hidden Meaning of Quantum Mechanics. Anthony graduated from Cambridge University and obtained his PhD at the International School for Advanced Studies. He has held research positions at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, Imperial College London, and Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He was professor of Physics at Clemson University and is an academic visitor at Imperial College London. He is also co author of Quantum Theory at the Crossroads, published by Cambridge University Press. I selected beyond the Quantum because it challenges the assumption that quantum mechanics is the final description of reality, arguing instead that it may be a statistical surface of a deeper deterministic framework. It combines a revisionist account of quantum theory's historical development and we'll get into that, along with a strong case for an alternative thesis that was never given a fair hearing. Most importantly, it advances a testable scientific program, making it both a conceptual and forward looking contribution to the foundations of physics. Anthony, thank you so much for joining me today to discuss your book.
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Antony Valentini
Thank you. My pleasure.
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Gregory McNiff
Anthony, why did you write beyond the Quantum at this point in your career and who did you have in mind as the primary audience?
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Antony Valentini
So the primary audience is the general public. Though I do have one eye on a broad scientific community. And I think the main reason I wrote it is because the specialized physics community, especially people who are interested in quantum mechanics, it seems to me that they are stuck in what you might call a pattern of wrong ideas, wrong arguments that they absorbed probably as undergraduates. And even though, I mean, well, there's a recurring problem that even though these arguments have been dismantled in the literature multiple times, somehow it's very hard to get them out of the system. It's as if there are some mistaken ideas which once they get into the system, into the textbooks, into the lecture courses, it's just very hard, they're very hard to dislodge. So I had a hope that, well, perhaps by addressing these issues to a broader audience, outside of this narrow specialist audience, that it might help shift things. I've also noticed, and friends and colleagues of mine have noticed that whenever we do outreach to the general public and we give talks about different interpretations of quantum mechanics, very frequently the general public is a bit mystified by the following. There is an interpretation of quantum mechanics. It's De Broglie Bohm pilot wave theory, which I've worked on for a long time and which goes back to De Broglie a century ago, which seems to make sense, it seemed clear, it seems straightforward. And then there are these other interpretations that say, well, the particle is there only when you look at it, or there are parallel universities and so on. And a common reaction that we get from the general public is why do physicists take these other ideas so seriously when there is this supposed, apparently straightforward interpretation? So what I'm saying is that as someone who has not suffered a traditional course in quantum mechanics, when they're presented with the alternatives, very frequently they look at this and think, well, to my mind, this seems like the obvious candidate that I would at least initially go for. Why is it instead that this candidate is marginalized and the other candidates are so popular now? Of course, some physicists might say, well, that's because the general public doesn't understand the subtleties. You know, they, they're unable to understand what's wrong with this interpretation and why we need these other ideas, I think that's wrong. I think what's really going on is that someone who is. Who is unprejudiced and unmuddled by the standard folklore, I think they can see clearly that. Hang on a second. If you. If you're really going to look at these other theories, you'd better have a really strong reason for doing it, and what are the reasons? And then, of course, when you look into the reasons, you know in, you find that they're not really solid. And I've tried hard in the book to show why. The usual arguments against De Broglie's theory were simply wrong. But as I said, they're repeated and repeated in textbooks and in physics courses. And once misunderstandings get into the system, it can be very hard to dislodge. So I have to say, also, I think there's something healthy about explaining in your ideas to the general public. I found myself, in some ways, understanding what I'm doing better. When you're forced to explain something in a way that is simple and concrete, to try to capture the essential point in a way that is understandable to the general public, I think often you end up understanding it better yourself. But as I mentioned, I also have an eye on the broad scientific community. Again, my feeling is that scientists who are, say, working in chemistry or in geology or astronomy, I think they must be wondering what on Earth. There are some theoretical physicists insisting that they have arguments that show that there is no objective reality, that human. Human consciousness somehow plays a role in bringing about reality. I think some of them, at least privately, must be wondering what on Earth has happened there. You know, that something has gone wrong. And I think something has gone wrong. And to bring it out into the public domain is perhaps a way to shift things, but we'll see.
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Gregory McNiff
Yeah, I think your book does a wonderful job of, I guess, restarting that conversation. But I want to start at the beginning. The existing or conventional notion of quantum mechanics is this Copenhagen interpretation in which the observer is part of the outcome. Could you talk about how we view quantum mechanics today and why you compare it to Ptolemy's Earth center model?
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Antony Valentini
Yes. Well, it's interesting. I find this analogy insightful and disturbing in Ptolemaic astronomy, which, of course, was taught across Europe for about 1400 years. So the Earth is at the center of the universe, and it's stationary, and the sun and the stars and the other planets are revolving around the Earth. Now, it's not so much the physical or mathematical details of the model, but some conceptual analogies. With quantum mechanics that are disturbing. So one, of course, is in quantum mechanics, human observers are somehow at the center of the universe. And so is that parallel in Ptolemaic astronomy, human beings are at the center of the universe. And of course, one of the the big shock of the Copernican revolution was that humanity was displaced from this privileged position. But there's another aspect that I think is more telling and insightful and disturbing is that in Ptolemaic astronomy, the universe is divided into two realms. A realm that we can understand and a realm that we cannot understand. So according to this philosophy, which really traces back to Aristotle, everything below the moon is made of ordinary matter, as the Greeks understood it. Earth, air, fire, water. That ordinary matter is imperfect, changing, decaying, and that the human mind, we're able to understand. So the everyday world around us we can understand, at least to some extent, according to Aristotle and Ptolemaic astronomy, from the Moon onwards. So going up above the Moon is a completely different kind of universe that is beyond human comprehension. It's not made of Earth, air, fire, water. It's some sort of heavenly ether. And so the stars, the sun, the other planets inhabit a sort of almost mystical ethereal realm that is completely different from what was called the sublunary sphere and is incomprehensible to human beings. Now, in Ptolemy's system, there's a complicated mathematical system of orbits and epicycles that explain the motion of what we see in the sky. We see these little points of light moving in the sky. And the mathematical model works as a way of predicting what will happen. So you can predict when there's going to be the next solar eclipse. You can predict where Mars will appear in the sky in three weeks time and so on, but it gives no understanding of what's actually happening. Now, the real point is that the philosophy behind Ptolemaic astronomy said that, well, it's just meaningless to ask what's really happening in the sky, because that is an ethereal realm beyond human comprehension. There's no physics of disguise. You can have a physics of what we see around us on the Earth. For the sky, what we see in the quote, the heavens is, you know, we can give you a mathematical formalism, but don't you think, don't try to ask physical questions about what's really going on. And of course, in quantum mechanics, students are taught the same kind of philosophy that in quantum mechanics you have two realms. There is the macroscopic realm of your equipment in the laboratory. Here you've got a GEIGER counter. Here you've got some apparatus, you have a pointer. You have various objects that you work with in the lab. But the. And that is something that we can talk about clearly and understand. You know, we don't fuss too much about. You know, if someone says, well, the Geiger counter clicked and I record the click, we don't argue about, well, did that really happen? Or did the Geiger counter click? Would it click if no one was looking at it? Or that. We don't have those kinds of arguments. There is an everyday macroscopic reality, but the quantum system, what physicists call the quantum system, inhabits a completely different kind of realm. You can't talk about quantum system as simply existing in a certain state. So students are taught to divide the world into two different realms. There's a macroscopic world of everyday classical physics we can talk about clearly and understand. And then there's the quantum world, which is this sort of mysterious, ethereal realm where you be careful not to ask questions about what's really going on. And we have a mathematical formalism that you can use to calculate the probability of getting various outcomes. But don't ask too many questions about what's really happening, because that's sort of meaningless. And of course, another aspect, finally, maybe I'm going on a bit too much about this, but just quickly, it's worth going through this because you might ask, well, what's wrong with this? What's wrong with having the universe divided in this way? Of course, one thing you might say is wrong with it is, well, it puts a limit to human understanding. How do you know we can't understand the other realm? But there's another thing that's wrong with it, is there is the problem of the dividing line. So if we say that, well, the moon and everything above the moon inhabits this ethereal realm, and everything below the moon is more physical and familiar material stuff. Well, then, where's the dividing line? What if I travel up towards the moon? You know, so I mean. I mean, I'm in a spaceship and I'm an astronaut made of ordinary matter. As I approach the moon, what happens? There's supposed to be some sort of dividing line. Is there a sudden transition? Is it an inch thick? Is it a mile wide? Is it, you know, as the astronaut hits that point where there is the. What happens to the astronaut? Does he suddenly become part of this heavenly ether? It's. And there's a similar question in quantum mechanics. If you say that, well, the quantum system is this ethereal something that we can't talk about clearly. And it's only when you have ordinary macroscopic matter that you can talk about things clearly. Well, where is the dividing line? Macroscopic matter is made of atoms. Now, if individual atoms are quantum systems which have this fuzzy quality of unreality to them, well, if that's true for one atom, presumably it's true for two atoms, three atoms, 10 atoms, 100 atoms. But a macroscopic object is made of zillions of atoms. How many atoms do I need in order for me to transition from this ethereal realm of unreality to the material world of everyday, real object ether? There is this problem of the dividing line, which is there is no clear dividing line, ultimately, between microscopic and macroscopic. So for this reason, the theory is actually fundamentally ambiguous. Even if you're willing to accept that there's an ethereal quantum realm that we cannot understand. Well, there's no precise boundary between quantum and non quantum or between microscopic and classical. So you have a theory that's ambiguous. And therein lies, I think, the essential reason why people have kept questioning this theory over the century. It's like having a tooth. There's something wrong with your tooth and your tongue can't stop going there. There's something wrong here. And so the questioning hasn't stopped. And if anything, in the last few decades, I would say that the old consensus, the Copenhagen consensus, has evaporated, and now the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics is up for grabs. Really excellent.
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Gregory McNiff
And I want to talk about your proposal. And I should say it's the pilot theory that de Broglie and Bohm pioneered. I know later they may have that, but could you give us a little background? And I believe de Broglie actually won the Nobel for it, and Einstein thought it was. Actually thought it was correct. Could you talk a little bit about what the pilot wave theory is and how it differs from our current understanding of quantum mechanics and how it answers some of the questions that our current model seems incapable of answering?
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Antony Valentini
Yes. Well, it's curious because historically de Broglie proposed pilot wave theory as early as 1923, initially for just a single particle, which he claimed that the motion of a particle is guided by a wave. So if you think of a bottle floating on the ocean and it's being pushed along by an ocean wave, it's a little bit like that as a rough analogy. But de Broglie's wave is not really a material wave, like an ocean wave. It's a new kind of thing. And what de Broglie was really doing is constructing a new theory of motion. So the reason that's important is because if you're thinking of a, a bottle floating on the ocean being pushed by an ocean wave, well, we would think about that in terms of Newton's laws, Newton's theory of motion, the wave is pushing on the bottle. So it's not like that in De Broglie's theory. De Broglie saw that we had to abandon Newtonian mechanics, and he proposed a new law of motion in which the velocity of a particle particle is guided by an accompanying wave. Now, his reasons for doing this, he had reasons for doing this. One was to explain atomic energy levels. So atomic energy levels and also the diffraction of single photons. But this theory, De Broglie proposed that this theory was true even for material particles such as electrons. And this immediately gave him a prediction. De Broglie predicted that if you fire the electrons one at a time at a screen with a small hole, that because the wave would undergo diffraction, that the particle would not just move in a straight line through the hole, but it would have a curved trajectory. And if you repeated this many times, you would observe interference and diffraction effects as we see with light, as had only been seen with light waves up until then. Now, what's interesting is that the interference and diffraction of single electrons was observed four years later in the lab in a famous experiment by Davison and Germa where they were firing single electron firing electrons at crystals of nickel. Now, and De Broglie's prediction was verified. Just to give you a sense of how crazy the history is that phenomenon, subsequently, for the rest of the 20th century, the phenomenon that de Broglie predicted was cited as evidence against De Broglie's theory, against the existence of actual particle trajectories. So students have been taught for decades that the famous two slit experiment, I fire a particle to a screen with two slits, you repeat it many times, you see an interference pattern on the other side. Students have been taught for the best part of a century that it's impossible to explain this in terms of electrons moving along definite trajectories. Now, how can this be when that phenomenon was first predicted by precisely such a theory? Now, what happened historically is that in 1926, Schrodinger got interested in, well, earlier than that, so he got interested in De Broglie's theory. So de Broglie completed his PhD thesis in 1924, and famously Einstein read it and was hugely impressed and alerted some of his colleagues. And you really have to read this. Schrodinger read it and at that time, De Broglie didn't quite have the correct equation for his waves. So Schrodinger set about. This was Schrodinger's great contribution, was to find the correct equation for the waves. The trouble is, Schrodinger set aside the trajectory. So De Broglie had a theory in which particle, particles, trajectories are guided by waves. Schrodinger came along and said, look, let's find the correct equation for the waves. But forget about these trajectories. There are no particle trajectories, just the wave. And this was a tragic mistake, I argue, because if you just have the waves and the theory just cannot make physical sense, if I want to explain, well, what happens now when I fire a single particle at the two slit screen. On the other side of the screen, I observe a single blip. The particle lands somewhere. It's just a small localized blip. How can I explain that if you only have the wave theory? It's simple. The wave guides the motion of the particle. The particle starts somewhere, it follows a definite trajectory, ends up somewhere. If you say there are no trajectories, it's just the wave. Well, the wave is spread out over space. It's spread out all over the backstop. Why do I see a small little blip somewhere? And this is the seed of what's called the quantum measurement problem, which is often discussed in terms of an example of Schrodinger's cat. I can have all, but you can talk about this for one particle. The particle can be in what seems to be a superposition of different states. It can be here or here or here or here. And if I only have the wave, it seems that all of these possibilities exist simultaneously. And if I'm talking about a cat, it seems that the cat can be dead and alive at the same time. This problem, quantum measurement problem, I argue, was historically created. It's an artificial problem that was created by Schrodinger in 1926 when he removed the trajectories and said, no, no, no, we're just going to have the way. And you know, there's been a century of confusion about this. That was quite unnecessary. If Schrodinger had had done his wonderful work developing the wave equation but keeping the trajectories, then there would never have been a measurement problem.
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Gregory McNiff
okay, I want to hit on a few themes there, but the first you say there's been confusion. De Broglie put forward this theory. Einstein thought it to be very credible and yet feels like part of your book is almost investigation or myth busting. And by that I mean through the records of The Solvay Conference 1920, this real debate came to a head with the key proponents. And later on we really haven't talked about Bohm, but he had conversations with Feynman in which Feynman acknowledged he understood the theory and yet missed it.
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Antony Valentini
Feels like so this theory, you know, there have been repeated attempts to shut down this theory and quite why? I'm not sure I fully understand why, but the first, you know, episode one, as it were, was De Roy in the 20s. It is a fact that at the 1927 Solvay Conference he presented the fall theory, the pilot wave theory of a system of many particles, and he showed how it could explain interference and diffraction. He showed how it could explain scattering. Contrary to widespread mythology, he essentially responded correctly to some criticism from Pauli. Also contrary to widespread mythology, the theory was extensively discussed at the conference. There was a lot of interest in his theory. The idea, the standard historical textbooks, the way they report it is that, well, number one, Du Broglie only had a simplified theory for one particle. Not true. Number two, the theory was, quote, hardly discussed at the conference. Not true. Number three, Dubroy was unable to respond to a devastating criticism from Pauli. Not true. It's perfectly clear that the historians who wrote those books, which is still widely cited, they. Well, they didn't, it seems they didn't really look at the actual proceedings of the conference which were published in French in 1928. One of the biggest shocks of my life is when I stumbled across those proceedings in a dark corner of the library back in. I think it was 1995 and my French is pretty good. And I could immediately see, just flicking through the volume that oh my God, this theory is discussed all over the place. There are dozens of pages of discussion because the discussions are all recorded. It's not just the lectures that are recorded and printed. The discussions are recorded in detail. Everything that was said. It was immediately clear that the way the historians have reported this is wrong in almost every detail. One of the things that they did wrong is the historians relied on later recollections by Bohr and Heisenberg. So decades later, Bohr and Heisenberg wrote their recollections of what happened at the fifth Salvik conference completely biased. They made it sound as if, well, De Broglie was just a bit, hardly even worth discussing and that the centerpiece of the conference was somehow the so called Bohr Einstein debate. And it makes it sound as if the word debate in English usually means a moderated public discussion. So it creates this impression that these people gathered at this conference and there was a debate between. There was no such debate. Bohr and Einstein had some private conversations over breakfast and dinner that were overheard by one or two other people. The actual conference, what went on at the conference, the actual debates that took place are all recorded in the discussion. They're printed in the book. There's not a word about this so called Borenstein debate, but these reports by Boren Heisenberg published decades later, they make it sound as if that's what the conference was really about. And you know, so there was a post conference, I don't know if propaganda is perhaps too strong a word, but still something like propaganda to convince the wider community that at this conference a consensus was reached in favor of Copenhagen and that the alternatives were just hopeless. It's just not true at all. There was no consensus reached, but somehow the wider community became convinced that this is what had happened, that Orn Heisenberg had won the day old fashioned naive realism had been defeated and de Broglie and his ideas would just sink without trace. Now, de Broglie actually soon after the conference, he gave up on his theory really for his own reasons that his theory, in his theory, when you have more than one, when you have a system of many particles, the wave that guides the particle has to exist in a higher dimensional space that encodes information about all of the particles. Now, de Broglie constructed this theory with some assistance from Schrodinger, who found the right way to equation and then he shrank back from it. It seemed to him that having a physical wave in this higher dimensional space was not really credible. And so he retreated anyway. So that was episode one. Episode two is of course, in 1951, 1952, when David Bohm. It's not quite clear how much Bohm knew about de Broglie's early work, but certainly Bohm rediscovered and or revived this theory and clarified some of the details. He also extended it to the electromagnetic field. I mean, he made a number of important contributions, which is why I think it's fair to call it the broibaum theory. And he published two wonderful papers published in Physical Review, which was the emerging premier journal of physics. You would have thought that that would have some impact. But Bohm was just simply largely ignored. There was some criticism from Pauli, Heisenberg that it was. I think Pauli actually had some perceptive and constructive criticisms at that time, but Heisenberg was very dismissive, accused Bohm of imposing an ideological superstructure on quantum mechanics. Now this is interesting and again we go back to how the history is, is so weirdly distorted, because post Bohm, the standard accusation which you still hear today is very common, is to say, oh, this theory, you are adding this unnecessary superstructure or you're adding trajectories to quantum mechanics. Okay, the way it's presented is, look, we've got quantum mechanics which works perfectly well, and you're coming along decades afterwards and adding this extra structure which feels arbitrary and contrived. That's what people say. Well, hang on a second. I mean, leaving aside whether or not this theory is correct, historically, what you're saying is completely backwards. In 1923, de Broglie had a theory with the wave and the trajectories. In 1927, he had the complete theory with the wave and the trajectories. The trajectories were removed by Schrodinger and others. In 1952, Bohm was simply putting back what Schrodinger had Removed. It's not that he's coming along after quantum mechanics been developed and you're adding in this arbitrary thing. No, just putting back something that arguably should never have been removed. But, you know, the way people present history is so muddled and distorted. And I think it's true that historical arguments do play a role in physical reasoning. You know, that there is something to the argument. What if someone comes along 30 years later and add some structure to a theory? You might question, well, is this really properly motivated? But if you're going to use historical arguments, well, you better get the basic historical facts right. And here the basic historical facts are not right. So that was episode two. Boehm was largely ignored, dismissed. Some wrong historical arguments, some wrong physical arguments, misunderstandings. And it seems that Boehm himself was so discouraged by this poor reception of his work that he himself, he just seemed to, after some 10 or 15 years, just start to forget about his theory. And there is an astonishing story which I tell in the book of Chris Eutney, who went to work with David Bohem at Birkbeck College around 1978 on the foundations of quantum mechanics. And Eudeni told me that he spent a whole year as a PhD student with Bohm. Bohm never mentioned the work he'd done in 1952. He never mentioned it. Judy didn't know about it. Giudene discovered this theory by. He was browsing in a nearby bookshop in London and came across a book published by, I think, a Dutch physicist, Bel Infante, called A Survey of Hidden Variables Theories. And in this book there is a chapter, or perhaps more than one chapter. Anyway, there's a large part of the book is devoted to Bohm's work of 1952. And Eudney was astounded and found it so interesting. And he went to his supervisor, said, well, what I didn't know, why didn't you tell me about this work you'd done? And it seems that Bohm had. It's not quite clear to what extent he had lost interest, to what extent he had forgotten about it, no longer understood it. He seemed to have moved on. Now, Bohm, in the 60s, his thinking moved towards certain kind of mysticism. He's thinking he took a completely different turn. He met Krishnamurti, he got interested in Eastern philosophy, He started thinking about physics in terms of some sort of merging of mind and matter. So his thinking was just that, had gone in a completely different direction. And it was really Dudney who got Bohm interested again in the theory, especially When Eudney did some computer simulations and he calculated in detail the trajectories. As particles go through a two slit experiment, the particles follow these peculiar wriggling motions. Because of the interference of the two waves coming out of the holes, particles wiggle around in strange ways to produce the interference pattern. It seems that Bohm was hugely impressed when he saw these trajectories and it really rekindled his interest. And then there's the beginning of what you might call episode three where Bohem starts working on the theory again. Others start noticing John Bell was interested, published some papers. Then there was a period, the 80s, 90s, that is when I think in the 90s, news about the existence of this theory really started to spread. And there of course were many attempts to shut this down and to claim that, well, oh, okay, you can explain the two slit experiment, but you can't explain this. And of course you can explain this. And oh, but you can't explain that. Again, I think that war is sent while that battle has been won. Now the theory is out there. I think most people know that it's out there, that they know that it sort of works, even if they don't like it. And now the battle tends to be about, well, I don't like the theory because because of this and this, because it clashes with relativity or because it, because you can't see the details of the shake. Now there are more techniques, arguments going on about whether the theory is acceptable or not. But there we are. Yeah.
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Gregory McNiff
And just for our readers, we're sort of in the first quarter to half of the book and Anthony, I want to talk to you about the implications and I'm going to read you a quote from the book. If this pilot wave theory is successful, would you believe it is? If it's a better understanding of quantum mechanics than the Copenhagen interpretation, it unveils a deeper reality in which everything in the universe is instantaneously connected with everything else. We will finally see quantum reality for what it is. A whole new physics will be opened up to us. And in the book you even suggest this would involve overturning Einstein's theory of relativity. You talk about quantum fog, quantum noise, quantum relaxation, quantum death. Could you talk about the implications of pilot wave theory for our understanding of the universe and what this new physics would? I know that's a really big question.
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Antony Valentini
By the way, we buy the book so well, so look, the essential point is fairly simple. So that in pilot wave theory, so De Broglie and Bohm showed how this theory can account for, for basic quantum phenomena such as two slit interference. However, in order to get agreement with quantum mechanics, you have to make an assumption about how the particles start out at the beginning of the experiment. You have to assume, specifically, you have to assume something about the positions of the particles at the beginning of the experiment, specifically the positions of the particles within the wave. So remember, the particles are being guided by the wave. Now, if I have a situation where I have many particles, it could be repeated the experiment many times, one particle at a time. You can ask, well, these particles, they start out somewhere within the wave. In order to get quantum mechanics, you have to assume that the particles are distributed in a way that matches the square of the height of the wave. So in other words, the particles, you have more particles where the wave is large and you have less particles where the wave is small. And more precisely, there's Born's formula, or the Born rule, that says that the distribution of particles is proportional to the square of the height of the wave. In quantum mechanics, that's a fundamental law, okay? Students are taught there's a fundamental law of quantum mechanics. If I have what's called the wave function, if I want to calculate the probability of finding the particle somewhere, that probability is given by the square of the magnitude of the wave. Now, in pilot wave theory, if you start out with a distribution of particles that matches the Born rule, in other words, it's distributed according to the square of the height of the wave. The equations show you that that distribution is preserved over time. It will stay that way. Once you have the Born rule, the Born rule will remain true. And so when you calculate an ensemble of trajectories and you see, well, what comes out the other side in the two slit experiment, you get, by construction, you get the usual wavy pattern, which is just the Born rule. Now that's all fine. And Bohm discussed in detail in 1952 how, for more general quantum type experiments, quantum measures, the same is true if you assume the Born rule distribution at the beginning, then you can explain, you get the same results as quantum mechanics. Now. Here is where, at least in my opinion, things get really interesting. Because in this theory, there's no reason why you can't start out with a distribution of particles that is different from the Born rule. And if you do that, you find that what comes out the other end is different from the Born rule. And you would get results that are different from quantum mechanics. So, for example, in the two slit experiment, I could start out with if the particles all started at around the same point Instead of being spread around inside the wave, if all the particles started at the same point within the wave, they would all end up at the same point on the backstop. You would just get one little blip. There wouldn't be this wavy interference pattern. So the message here is that if you take pilot wave theory seriously, it's telling you that quantum physics is just a special case of something much broader. The fact that in the lab, we always see the born rule, according this theory, you don't have to see the born rule. You could see something different. And the physics that we're seeing is really just a special case of something broader. Now, this opens up all kinds of things because you can show in this theory, if you have distributions of particles that break the born rule, then, well, from the point of view of standard physics, all hell breaks loose. Because now, entangled particles will. If you have entangled particles, you will observe superluminal signals between the particles. The actual probability distribution for this particle will depend instantaneously on what happens at the other side. And you would be able to send practical superluminal signals. You would also be able to beat the uncertainty principle. Because what happens in the uncertainty principle, roughly speaking, is if everything is governed by the born rule, if I have a quantum system that I'm trying to probe, the equipment that I'm using has the same statistical noise in it. And this sets limits on the accuracy to which I can probe the system. These limits are called the Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Again, widely regarded as a fundamental law of nature. In pilot wave theory, that's not true. A Heisenberg uncertainty is a property of the born rule state, which, according to pilot wave theory, is just a special state. Now, but then there's the question, well, why don't we observe this wider physics? When I go in the lab, why do I always see the born rule? Why don't I see particles distributed differently? Pilot wave theory, again has an answer. And this is work that I did in the early 90s. I mean, I got interested in the point. It seemed to me that if you take this theory seriously, it's telling you there's a wider physics in which superluminal signaling is possible and you can break the uncertainty principle. And the question then becomes, why don't we see it? And in my view, the answer is that you have to take into account the. What we know about the history of the universe. Just in a basic sense. The particles that we see in the lab have not been sitting there in a vacuum for billions of years, waiting for us to measure them. They have a long, complicated history. They have complicated interactions with other things. And this history stretches back to the Big Bang. Now, you can show from the equations of pilot wave theory that at least with certain plausible assumptions, that when particles undergo complicated interactions, they will very rapidly evolve towards the Born rule state. Essentially, the complicated wriggling motions, the complicated trajectories of these particles, have the effect that the particles will spread around within the wave in a way, way that very quickly ends up matching the square of the amplitude of the wave. It's a bit like, you know, gas molecules inside a box. If they start at one corner of the box, as they spread around with their complicated motions, they spread around over the box and reach what's called quant, sorry, what's called thermal equilibrium in the same sense. I made some general arguments 1990, 90, 91, explaining how this would work, and it's been backed up by extensive computer simulation since then, showing in various circumstances how, if I begin in pilot wave theory with a distribution of particles that does not match the wave according to the Born's rule, very quickly they evolve towards a distribution that does match the wave. So if you follow this reasoning, what does it tell you? It tells you that, well, the reason we see the Born rule today in the lab is not because it's a fundamental law of physics. It's because it's the natural equilibrium state towards which the universe has evolved owing to this past history of complex interactions and so on. So that led me to consider the idea that, well, perhaps in the very early universe, that is the place to look for possible violations of quantum mechanics. And there's a long story about how. Well, according to our current understanding of cosmology, or at least inflationary cosmology, which is the leading theory, the radiation that we see in the sky, the cosmic microwave background, that is a relic of the Big Bang, according to inflationary cosmology, the small inhomogeneities of temperature that you see in the cosmic microwave background was actually generated by quantum fluctuations in the very early universe that created small inhomogeneities that were then amplified and grew with time to be imprinted in the cosmic microwave background. Now, the statistical features of those temperature inhomogeneities, or anisotropies, are actually calculated using the Born rule in inflationary cosmology, if you want to calculate what's called the primordial power spectrum, which tells you the statistical distribution of these little inhomogeneities in the early universe, that is calculated using the Born rule. Now, according to the line of reasoning that I've followed. Well, you would expect that in the very early universe the born rule could have been broken and therefore you would predict anomalies in the cosmic microwave background. And there's much to say about that. Anomalies have been reported at very large wavelengths in the microwave background, though their existence is controversial. The anomalies, at least qualitatively, they're the kind of anomalies that you would expect to see from pilot wave theory, Though the details are very hard to match with data because the data is very novel. Icy. So the jury is very much out on whether there is evidence for the theory from these anomalies, and the jury is very much out on whether these anomalies even exist. But still, there's a line of reasoning that has been developed. And of course, a related possibility is that if you accept the idea that wealth particles obey the born rule today because of this complex process of what I call quantum relaxation, well, then if we look back to the very early universe, there could be, and it is widely believed that there are particles, exotic kinds of particles that will have stopped interacting very early on, soon after the big bang. There are certain kinds of particles that are what's technically called decoupled, will have decoupled at very early times and are still floating around in the universe, possibly making up what astrophysicists call dark matter. Now, those particles, if they exist, they decoupled sufficiently early, they might not have had time to reach the state of quantum death, as I call it, or the bourn rule state. They may still still show some traces of violations of the born rule, which could potentially be searched for if, for example, we observe dark matter particles annihilating. And some people think that we are already observing such annihilation in the form of gamma rays from the center of our galaxy. That's controversial, but potentially, if something like that is confirmed, the gamma rays that are created when these particles annihilate could carry violations of the born rule. And if we could perform certain quantum experiments with them, we might be able to test for this. Gone off on a long ramble there. You'd better stop me, Greg, and maybe ask me to a specific question. But
- [56:31]
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- [58:30]
Gregory McNiff
So just to hit you with the front one, can we test the pilot wave theory? I think some criticisms of current current cosmology theories, and here I'm pointing a finger at string theory is it's not verifiable. Can we mathematically or in a lab test and prove the pilot wave theory?
- [58:49]
Antony Valentini
The short answer is it depends in theory. Okay, here's the bad news. In theory it could be that this theory is true, but that in the very early universe this relaxation took place very quickly and so precisely that 14 billion years later there's just no hope of finding any trace of what went before. That is possible. And that's the nightmare scenario that the theory could in principle be true, but you're never going to see any deviation from standard quantum mechanics and so we'll never be able to to to check and verify that theory is true. That is possible. However, as I said so for example, in inflationary cosmology it is the case that if there Are early violations of the Born rule, then that can cause anomalies in the cmb. Okay, that. That. That is true, assuming inflationary. And that's assuming that inflationary cosmology is broadly true, which some people think is perhaps not the case. So there are already some cosmo, but with that cosmological assumption, you would see the anomalies in the cosmic microwave background. However, that is assuming that during inflation, the universe didn't expand exponentially for too long. So in inflation, there's an early period of exponential expansion. If that period lasted a very long time, then the wavelengths at which we expect to see anomalies could be stretched out to such vast distances that we won't be able to measure them. So there are various caveats here. One line of reasoning that I followed in more recent years is that you might ask, well, okay, instead of searching for relics, as it were, of quantum relaxation from the early universe, is there not a way to create violations of the Born rule today? Now, it seems as best that if the pilot wave theory, as we have it, is correct, it seems that under normal circumstances, there's no way to get out of this equilibrium state. Once you reach the state described by the Born rule, you're stuck there. However, that is true in the absence of gravity. If you start thinking deeply about how gravity fits in with quantum mechanics, then it seems possible that in some exotic conditions involving, for example, exploding black holes, that subtle gravitational effects could make the Born rule unstable in the sense that if I have a system or a distribution of particles, it initially matches the quantum wave, it matches the Born rule, that the particles could evolve away from that state. This is if certain peculiar effects from quantum gravity turn out to be real. Briefly, there's a longstanding something that was discovered actually in 1991 by Klaus Kiefer and Tejinde Sing, who were discussing just not in pilot wave theory, but in quantum gravity, which is really the theory of the quantum wave in quantum gravity without the trajectories. But anyway, I'm trying to understand how from that theory you can derive the usual Schrodinger equation for the quantum wave in ordinary conditions. And what they showed how to do that, but they showed that quantum gravity also implies certain corrections to the Schrodinger equation, which you would expect there to be some tiny corrections. But some of these corrections don't fit the usual formalism of quantum mechanics. In particular, some of those corrections seem to break what's called the conservation of probability, which doesn't really make sense. And so there's been a tendency to just ignore these terms. We don't know how to interpret them. Those terms can be interpreted perfectly well in pilot wave theory. If you go through the mathematics, it's pretty straightforward that if those terms are real, what they will imply is that if I begin with a state of quantum equilibrium, I can evolve away from that state. Now, those correction terms could have been important in the final stages of an evaporating black hole, which suggests that the. So the radiation that hawking in the 70s famously predicted would be emitted from black holes, that that radiation could, at some level of accuracy, could be created in a state that breaks the born rule. So if tomorrow we observe radiation from what are called primordial black holes left over from the early universe, and this is a realistic possibility that people are searching for, if such radiation is found, then potentially that radiation might violate the usual rules of quantum mechanics. So there are various ways in which the theory could be tested. However, all of these scenarios do depend on certain details. For instance? Well, you know, some people might argue that, well, perhaps the population of primordial black holes is much smaller than we expect, and it's not going to be realistic to actually detect these exploding objects and so on and so forth. So, you know, there is. The practical possibility of observing these kinds of effects doesn't depend just on pilot wave theory. It also depends on certain details of cosmology and astrophysics which are not known with 100% certainty. So it's complicated. It's complicated. Testing these ideas is not easy. It's not a straightforward case of, well, oh, if pilot wave theory is true, well, then that's fine. Let's just go in the lab, measure X and Y, and we'll be able to test whether it's true. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as that. Something I've been looking, I mean, just to just be brief, something I've been doing much more recently and which is only mentioned briefly in the book because I'm only just now developing these ideas, is the possibility that in high energy collisions at very short timescales that deviations from the born rule might be generated. And there's a bit of a long story about why that might be true. Again, motivated by pilot wave theory. But, well, as I said, there's a bit of another story, but there is recent work on that. So I suppose the bottom line is, yes, the theory, at least the way I view the theory, does offer the possibility of quite radical new physics that could be observed. Whether we'll actually observe it in practice, well, we'll need some luck. It depends on certain assumptions remains to be seen. I should also mention that the community, the small community of people working on this theory is split on this whole issue. I mentioned that Bruh and Bohm showed how you can reproduce quantum mechanics if you assume that the Born rule is true. Now Bohm in his early papers considered the idea that you could have deviations from the Born rule. And the early Bohm 1952, 53 was thinking along lines quite similar to the sort of thing that I've been developing over 30, 35 years. But somehow from the late 50s onwards, this idea got forgotten. The small community of people working on this theory, they tend to take the Born Rule as one of the axioms or postulates of the theory. So you've got the Scherpinger equation, you've got the equation for the trajectories, and then you've got the Born rule, which is usually regarded as a, as a postulate theory. Now from this point of view, and this is still. The majority of people working on this theory still take the view. They view the. From my point of view, they're saying that the equilibrium theory is the theory. And to my mind, as I've argued strenuously in the book, this just makes no sense at all. It's like looking at the theory of gases. I have, as I say, going back to the example, and I have gas molecules in a box in thermal equilibrium. The gas molecules are distributed uniformly over the box and you can calculate the way the speeds of the particles will be distributed. This is standard thermal physics that you find in the textbooks. Nobody would say that that has to be so. Gas molecules do not have to be in a state of thermal equilibrium. And in fact they're often not. If I let some gas into a box initially it comes into one corner of the box. After a while it will spread out and reach thermal equilibrium. But that takes time. So thermal physics is just a special case of a wider non equilibrium physics. And I think the same is true in pilot wave theory. The theory with the Born rule is a special equilibrium case. It does not have to be true, and I can't see why it would have necessarily been true in the early universe. There are also possibilities about how even if it's true today, there are ways in which systems could be knocked out of this state. But as I say, I find it also most unfortunate that the few people who have worked on this theory have tended to take the Born Rule as an axiom. And so they see what I'm doing. Thing is Somehow anathema, this guy Valentini is rocking the boat. And we've worked hard to convince people that, look, you can explain quantum mechanics with trajectories. And then there's this person Valentini, who's arguing that we can also go beyond quantum mechanics and that we should be looking for deviations from quantum mechanics.
- [71:08]
Gregory McNiff
Anthony, just to give you more credit, not only do you tackle Born formula and suggest that it isn't a fundamental law, you suggest the relativity of time and Lorentz invariants are also.
- [71:23]
Antony Valentini
Yes. So here you go. So there's another split within the community. I mean, there's a small number of people who work on this theory. They try to construct a theory in which fundamentally relativity is true. Now, if you believe that the equilibrium theory is the theory, then you're never going to see practical superluminal signaling because the quantum noise associated with born rule always stops you from seeing the underlying nonlocality directly. Now, if you believe that, well, that is what we're always going to see. We'll never see superluminal signaling because we always have the Bourne rule, then it seems sort of plausible that, well, maybe I can get away with making a theory in which relativity is always true. If instead you follow my line of reasoning where I say, well, look, if you take this theory seriously, you would expect that at some time, perhaps in the past or the future, or somehow in some conditions, there are going to be broader conditions in which the born rule is broken and we will see practical superluminal signals. Now, when that is true, then you have a head on collision with relativity, because according to relativity, the way relativity is constructed, it makes it appear as if superluminal signaling will be paradoxical. Because what will happen if I have a signal that is seen to be instantaneous according to one observer, a moving observer could see the same signal traveling backwards in time and potentially generate all kinds of paradoxes. And so people say, well, then we can't have superluminal signaling because you would get paradoxes. Now, the argument there is, again, if you think it through, the argument doesn't really add up because in a sense, you're assuming what you're trying to prove. If relativity is fundamentally true, then instantaneous signals would generate paradoxes. But if it's not fundamentally true, there's no paradox. Now, specifically, what would happen in a world where we have actors, access to practical instantaneous signals? You would use those signals to synchronize your clocks of clocks that are widely separated. I would use those signals to synchronize clocks. I would not do what Einstein did in 1905, which is to use light signals to synchronize clocks. Now, what happens if you use light signals to synchronize clocks and if you replace, repeat that procedure for differently moving observers, assuming the speed of light to always be the same? From the point of view of this theory, the moving observer's clocks are incorrectly synchronized. He's used light signals. His clocks are not correctly synchronized. Now, if all that sounds a bit fiddly, it's really quite straightforward. Let me give you an analogy. Let's say you, you, you, you're in Paris and you jump on a plane and you fly to London. And let's say the flight takes half an hour. Now, I can leave Paris at 2:00pm Paris time, and that is 1:00pm in London. Now, if it takes me half an hour to fly to London, I can arrive in London at 1:30. Have I traveled back in time? I left at 2pm I left Paris at 2pm I arrive in London half an hour earlier than I arrived. It's not a power. If we think about this, it wasn't. Look, you haven't traveled back in time. What has happened here is that the clocks in Paris and London are set in such a way that the clocks in London are set one hour behind the clocks in Paris. We haven't really gone back in time. It's just a peculiarity about the way the clocks are set. Now, if you think through, there's supposed to be a deep problem that relativity shows that superluminal signaling is paradoxical. There's no paradox. If you think it through, what you find is that the moving observer's clocks have been set in such a way that the signal appears to go back in time, but it's just the clocks have been incorrectly synchronized. If you use the superluminal signals themselves to synchronize your clock, there will be no paradox. And then the equations of relativity on this view do not hold at the deeper level of the trajectories. It's only at the level if I, in a sense, average over many trajectories, assuming the. Then the superluminal signals average out to zero. There are no practical superluminal signals. And then standard relativity emerges. There's no superluminal signaling. It makes sense to use light signals to synchronize your clocks, and the usual symmetries of what's called Lorentz invariance emerge from the equations. But if you look at the. For example, if you look at the equations that Bohm wrote down in 1952, for the electromagnetic field. In those equations, there is a preferred state of rest, and the non locality acts instantaneously in that frame. It's only when you average over systems described by the born rule that the nonlocality disappears and you find that the equations, the symmetry, the usual symmetries of relativity emerge just as a property of equilibrium. They're not valid at the deeper level. And here again, I would say that one of the wrong and modeled arguments that keeps being repeated even today is that. What? Well, pilot wave theory can't be true because relativity has been confirmed by countless experiments over 120 years. And so, you know, to say that relativity is violated is. It just must be wrong. This theory must be wrong. That argument is framed in a way that it simply does not make sense. Because what we're saying here is not that relativity is violated at the level of physics we see in the lab today. We're saying that relativity will be violated at a deeper level whose details we have not been able to probe yet experimentally because the details are obscured by the quantum noise of the Born rule state. So now to argue that, well, the deeper level you're proposing cannot exist because it will violate relativity. That is not a scientific argument because we haven't been able to experimentally probe that deeper level yet. So how do you know that relativity must be true at this deeper level if we haven't experimentally probed a deeper level yet? There's no contradiction with the experimental evidence for relativity at the level of the experiments we see today. Pilot wave theory, if you take it seriously, it's telling you that even our most advanced scientific experiments are only probing a special case of what is possible. And in that special case, relativity is true. Corporation quantum theory is true. But outside of that special case, both theories will break down.
- [79:46]
Gregory McNiff
Okay, Anthony, we're currently in a state of quantum death. How does gravity come in and save the day and lead us back to some sense of, I guess, quantum rebirth?
- [79:59]
Antony Valentini
Yeah, well, so, as I said, there was this interesting work going back to the 1991 and subsequently reiterated in particular by Klaus Kiefer and coworkers, who is a world authority on quantum gravity. Not to say he's a proponent of pilot wave theory, but he's a world expert in quantum gravity. And Kiefer and his coworkers have kept coming up with. In their calculations, they're calculating quantum gravitational corrections to the ordinary Schrodinger equation, and they keep finding terms that don't make sense. According to quantum mechanics, these terms would violate what's called conservation of probability, which just means that probabilities have to add up to 100%. Okay, let's say I've got a coin. I keep tossing a coin, and maybe it's a biased coin. The probability of heads is 30% and the probability of tails is 70%. 70 and 30 is 100. The total probability has to be 100%. If I said to you that I had a coin, which when I toss it, the chances of heads are 30% and the chances of tails are 40%, you would say, well, hang on a second. What about the other 30%? It doesn't make any sense. Now, what happens is that in quantum mechanics, if you calculate probabilities according to the Born rule, the total probability has to add up to. To one or in fact, or to 100%. And you can show from the equations that this is true initially, it stays true. The terms that Kiefer and coworkers found break this, and you can't really make sense of those terms in quantum mechanics. So the standard approach has been to just ignore these terms. I mean, are two kinds of corrections that they calculate. There's one type that does make sense in quantum mechanics, and there are this. And they then use these terms to calculate various effects and to perhaps calculate corrections to the cosmic microwave background due to quantum gravity and so on. They publish papers about this. The other terms they simply ignore because they don't know what to do with it. And they're quite explicit about this. It's not as if they hiding anything. But now, the point is, in pilot wave theory, if you take these terms seriously and you work through the equations, you find that all that happens is there's no inconsistency here. What will happen is if I begin with the distribution of particles that matches the Born rule, as the particles evolve and the wave function evolves, the effect of these terms will be such that the distribution of particles will drift away from the Born rule. It will no longer match the square of the quantum wave. And so if there are conditions where these effects are important, they could provide a way of driving us of. Well, of allowing us to escape from this state of quantum deaths or quantum equilibrium. And as I said, one place where these effects could be important is in the final stages of black hole evaporation. So potentially, Hawking radiation could contain small violations of Bourne rules. So if we're lucky enough to observe radiation from exploding primordial black holes, that would be something to look at to test that radiation to see if it obeys the Born rule. And standard quantum mechanics. Of course, if we find a deviation from the born rule, then you know, this new physics would potentially be opened up to us.
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- [85:19]
Gregory McNiff
And with this new physics we would have access to new quantum technologies. For example, you talk about the implications or the, I guess the technology advancement of sub quantum matter.
- [85:33]
Antony Valentini
Yes. A little bit of balance. Yes. If you break the born rule, then all kinds of what physicists would call miracles would be allowed. So one would be practical superluminal signaling and breaking the uncertainty principle. Some of the technological implications, which of course full implications are hard to discern. I'm sure there are many implications that we're unable to foresee now, but some of the obvious ones are that so what's called quantum cryptography would become insecure or hackable. So quantum cryptography is supposed to allow people to message each other in total secrecy. And the way it works, long story short, is that people can share a key or a code that they use to encrypt and decrypt the messages. And the point is that this co code is supposed to be known only to the sender and the receiver. That an eavesdropper is unable to know what the key or the code is. And the reason they're unable to know it is because the code has been generated by quantum effects that essentially the eavesdropper would have to beat the uncertainty in order to hack into the system. Now, because most physicists think that the uncertainty principle is a rock solid law of physics, the idea is that while this is a completely secure system, quantum cryptography cannot be hacked, because to do so you would have to break the laws of physics. According to pilot wave theory. Of course, the uncertainty principle is not a law of physics. It's a feature of the special state we have to be stuck in. So if the eavesdropper had access to matter that breaks the bourne rule, they would be able to use that to eavesdrop on the distribution of these secret keys and would be able to intercept or decrypt the messages without the ALICE and Bob, as they're often called, without them knowing. So they would be communicating, supposedly in complete secrecy. The eavesdropper would be able to hack into the system. That's one implication. Another potential implication is for quantum computing, that in this theory, if you allow non equilibrium or non born rule states, certain tasks that are impossible in quantum mechanics become possible. In particular, there's a certain property of quantum mechanics which says that if I have two quantum states that in a sense overlap, then it's not possible to distinguish them in a single shot measurement reliably. In pilot wave theory, this is no longer true, essentially because these two different quantum waves will generate different trajectories in general. And if I can see the details of the trajectories, I can distinguish the two states reliably. Now, if you allow that to. So what's called the, you know, the problem of distinguishing what are technically called non orthogonal states, if that's possible, then new kinds of computation become possible. And it looks as if you would be able to design new kinds of computers that are probably more powerful, even more powerful than quantum computers. I say probably because the details haven't been worked out yet. There are certain technicalities about. If you want to quantify how powerful a computer is, you need to study exactly how the resources you need scale with the size of the computational tasks that you're looking at. Particular, do the resources scale exponentially or not? If they scale exponentially, then that's bad news as widely seen as well, that's not a, not a practical efficient scenario. But anyway, those studies remain to be done. But I mean, I'm guessing that it will turn out be. If you allow quantum non equilibrium, then you probably have forms of computation that are even more powerful than quantum, but that remains to be studied. And then of course, the superluminal signaling now on Earth, no one's going to get too excited. I mean, I'm in London and you're in New York and I remember right, I think it takes something like a 50th of a second, a light signal to go from one city to the other. If I could signal to you instantaneously, no one's going to get too excited. So we're talking over zoom. Ultimately there is a delay of at least a 50th of a second between me speaking and you hearing me speak. We don't really notice it. So who cares? If I could use subcommittee want a matter to have a zoom call where we eliminate that 50th of a second delay, we're not really going to notice. But then if you're on the moon or if you're on Mars. So if you're on Mars, depending on the relative position of the Earth and Mars as they're moving, it can take up to 20 minutes for a light signal to go from one planet to another. And this is a problem with, you know, there are robotic rovers exploring the surface of Mars controlled by radio signals from Earth. If something goes wrong with the machine over there, we won't know about it for up to about 20 minutes. And then if you want to send a signal back to tell it what to do to avoid a certain obstacle or something, then it may take 20 minutes and so on. If we had non equilibrium matter or sub quantum matter that's in a state, it's just ordinary matter, but where the statistical distribution is no longer given by the born rule. In particular, if it had an amount of noise that was smaller than the standard quantum noise, if we had pairs of such particles entangled, shared between Earth and Mars. So if you created entangled particles in the lab and we say put some on a rocket, we keep some on Earth and you take the other particles to Mars, or maybe you fire them at Mars anyway in some way, you need a way of sharing entangled particles between Earth and Mars. Once this has been set up, if you're at your base on Mars and I'm here on Earth, we would be able to communicate instantaneously using these particles. Is this a realistic scenario that might one day be used in practice? Who knows? Of course, the first step would be actually finding such particles. I should mention something that I discuss towards the end of the book, is that according to our understanding of cosmology, it's quite possible that on large scales, the universe actually contains a sort of sea of relic particles from the early universe which are entangled. It's quite likely that you would expect this just from understanding of the basic dynamics of the early universe that there would be. In the example I've given you of Earth and Mars, there's this awkward thing that, well, I have to entangle particles on Earth and then I have to transport these particles to Mars and then they're entangled with the ones that are left on it. You might say, well, if I want to expand this over larger distances and I'm going to have to transport particles over vast distances, how are we going to do that? You actually might not need to do that. There probably is, in a way a resource of entangled particles spread across the universe that is just naturally occurring. It's a naturally occurring resource. Now we expect such particles to exist. The question of course is do they obey the born rule or not? If they don't obey the born rule, then hey presto, there could exist a naturally occurring resource of non equilibrium entangled particles across the universe that would form a sort of cosmic web, if you like, where I pull here and there's an instantaneous response over there. And this could provide a means of communicating across the galaxy, potentially even intergalactic communication. In principle, from what I can see, if you take pilot wave theory seriously and from what we understand about cosmology, in principle, this looked possible. How practical it might be, there are various issues there, but it does look as if in principle something like that could happen.
- [95:36]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, I think, Anthony, you make a very strong case for this deeper reality where we are connected across the universe instantaneously. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you beyond the Quantum. It's an unbelievable thought provoking read. I wish you the best of luck and I'm really grateful for the chance
- [95:57]
Antony Valentini
to talk with you about it.
- [95:58]
Gregory McNiff
I can't tell you how mind blowing it is. And like I said, it's just fascinating to hear, I guess, the real history, the true story of pilot wave theory and the implications for it. I have a feeling we'll be hearing more of it, thankfully, with your book.
- [96:15]
Antony Valentini
Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.
- [96:18]
Gregory McNiff
Likewise.
- [96:19]
Antony Valentini
Thanks again, Anthony.