Copyright 1998-2007 by Donald R. Tveter, http://www.dontveter.com, commercial use is prohibited. This material cannot be quoted at length or posted elsewhere on the net or included in CD ROM collections. Short quotations are permitted provided proper attribution is given.

In the beginning people thought that the only reason the world worked was that God was busy controlling every detail of it, without his attention nothing would work, for instance we have: Colossians 1:17 from The Book:

He was before all else began and it is his power that holds everything together.

Atheists looked at the clockwork universe and noticed that you could claim that things always just were (the universe was eternal), things just happen without any plan behind them at all and the laws of physics kept things working without the need for a creator. Even when evidence that the universe was created from nothing about 15 billion years ago began to surface atheists still assumed that the Big Bang was something that just happened based on natural laws that are not yet known and it was not the work of any creator.

But then along came Special relativity and it gave scientists an idea that they still can't accept called the block universe. Special relativity says there is no such thing as "now" and the past, present and future all have to out there at once as a kind of block of everything. General relativity re-enforced this idea.

Then came quantum mechanics (QM). Quantum mechanics deals with the motion of the tiniest particles of matter and when particles are that small whole new rules were found to apply. With big things you could always predict where they were going and when they were going to get there. But in QM the little things move around in a somewhat random fashion. Instead of just being particles they also seemed to be like waves. Physicists quickly found the equations that tell them how likely the little thing is to end up in one place or another but there is no certainty. Nothing can be predicted with certainty. It's a flip of the coin or a roll of the dice. Or so it seems. So with QM we have the idea of non-determinism. Physicists have always been confused about just what is going on with quantum mechanics but in recent years physicists are beginning to accept the idea that non-locality is true because specific experiments confirm the results predicted by the equations.

A important result from studying quantum mechanics is Bell's theorem from physicist John Bell. It gives more strange results that suggest to some people that the past, present and future must all be out there "at once". Bell never settled on an interpretation of his theorem but he recognized that one solution to the problem was that everything in the universe is pre-determined. Bell called the idea superdeterminism (also spelled super-determinism). I am going to be using "block universe" and "superdeterminism" interchangeably even though the two ideas originated from different sources.

These major developments together with a few other smaller results all point to an outlook on the world that is different from the contemporary view of the world that people and scientists have. In fact scientists have been trying to avoid this new viewpoint because of the strange implications that go with it. On the other hand I believe this new view is quite compatible with the Bible and so what we have is an example of Science finally catching up with the Bible. Modern science takes us right back to the old idea that God is in control of absolutely everything. These modern results from physics also tell us other interesting things about our world.

Albert Einstein had his theory of special relativity published in 1905. It is interesting that special relativity alone, a result that goes back over 100 years is enough to shatter our current view of reality but physicists have had trouble accepting the implications. At the end of the 19th Century physicists had noticed that light seems to behave like a wave rather than like a particle. Now they thought that a wave has to be a wave in something, like a wave in water or sound wave in the air so physicists were thinking that light was a wave in something they simply called the "ether". Now they thought that the Earth was traveling through this ether and so they should be able to find out how the Earth was moving relative to the ether. They thought they would be able to figure that out by measuring the speed of light in two different directions and finding a difference. Michelson and Morley did the experiment and instead of finding a difference they found out that the speed of light was the same in every direction. This caused big trouble for conventional thinking. A physicist named H. A. Lorentz first came up with the formulas that explained this, the Lorentz transformation equations. The equations predicted things that were even worse for common sense thinking.

Special relativity has to do with space, time and objects that are moving relative to each other at a constant speed. It works like this. Suppose you are sitting on the Earth and you watch a light wave go by at 186,000 miles per second. Suppose there is also a spaceship going by in the same direction as the light at a speed of 161,000 miles per second (that's 86.6% of the speed of light) so that from Earth the difference in the speed is 25,000 miles per second. So far, so good. But now jump on the spaceship. Measure the speed of that light. Common sense would say the light is going by at 186,000 - 161,000 = 25,000 miles per second. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. Even on the spaceship the light is still going by at 186,000 miles per second. To make things work out something has to give and distance and time are the only items available. So special relativity says that distances shrink and time slows down as you get close to the speed of light. There are plenty of experiments that show that space and time do shrink so everyone believes this even though it seems to be nuts. So as it turns out in the above spaceship example for people on Earth time ticks by seemingly normally but on the spaceship the clock is running half as fast compared to a clock on Earth. But then if you're on the spaceship time seems to tick by just as normally as it would on Earth. If, on Earth we see a star 4 light years away then on a spaceship passing by Earth and headed in the direction of the star at 161,000 miles per second you see it as only 2 light years away. As you go faster and faster time slows down even more. At 99.5% of the speed of light time will pass 1/10 as fast as on Earth and the distance will be 1/10 the distance you measure from Earth, that would be 4/10 light years. If you could get the spaceship to exactly the speed of light (but you can't and there is a good reason for this) then the distance it has to travel would be 0 and the time it takes to get there would be 0. People never noticed this strange effect before because at everyday speeds you can't find a difference, the difference only becomes noticeable when you get close to the speed of light.

This leads us to the famous twin "paradox" example which isn't a paradox at all. Take two identical twins, they will have the same age to start with of course, put one on a spaceship traveling at 99.5% of the speed of light and it will take just a bit over 4/10 of a year to get to the star, then return this twin at the same speed and it takes just a bit over 4/10 of a year to get back for a total of just over 8/10 of a year. For the twin on Earth it looks like it took a bit over 4 years for his twin to get to the star and a bit over 4 years to get back. The twin on Earth ages just over 8 years while the twin on the spaceship ages just over 8/10 of a year. This result has been confirmed over and over for sub-atomic particles travelling at high speeds and particle accelerators have to be designed to take this fact into account in order for them to work at all. For more on this strange result, see for instance: Alternate View Column AV-38 by physicist John Cramer or google "twin paradox".

A particle of light is called a photon and it only travels at the speed of light. It can do this because it has no rest mass. Other particles and spaceships made of these other particles have a rest mass and so they can never make it to the speed of light. The really interesting thing is that for a photon the distance it travels shrinks down to nothing and the time it takes to go from one place to another also shrinks down to nothing. To quote astrophysicist John Gribbin from page 79 of his book, Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality

From the point of view of a photon, it takes no time at all to cross the 150 million km from the Sun to the Earth (or to cross the entire Universe), for the simple reason that this space interval does not exist for the photon.

Perhaps they are simply so stunned by what the equations say that they have not fully thought out the implications.

An amazing implication follows from this strange but simple result. Since photons get where they're going in no time at all it means the whole universe, from past to future has to be out there "at once". Suppose you take your flashlight outside and point it up into the sky and turn it on. One photon from your flashlight might travel a few feet to hit a particle of dust in the air. Another might go on for several hundred years to hit a spaceship traveling between the stars. Another photon might travel a billion years to make it to some distant planet where it hits the eye of some being looking through a telescope. All the future has to be out there ready for photons from the present and the past. The future that is a few feet away has to be there. The future that is several hundred years away has to be there. The future that is a billion years away has to be there. Everything but everything has to be "out there" "at once". This applies to things in the past too. If you stand outside and shine your flashlight into space there is light coming from distant stars that will end up hitting you. Each of these photons gets to you in no time from the perspective of the photons so the past has to be out there at the same time as well.

To continue on Gribbin even notes that if there was one atom in the entire universe and it wanted to radiate a photon, it couldn't because there was nowhere the photon could go. It has to "know" ahead of time what's out there and it has to make arrangements to go there before it leaves. So suppose you take your flashlight outside and you point it at some point in space where there is no matter out there in the future. No light will come out of your flashlight because it has no place to go!

Now notice how this process differs from the way we normally think about reality. Normally people think the photons head out from the flashlight and then - BY CHANCE - they are absorbed by one atom or the other along their path - but again - they don't do that, they pick out a place to go before they leave and then they go there in no time at all from their perspective.

With the universe all out there "at once" the universe is a thing that just is, not something that is developing moment by moment. I picked up the following from Professor James F. Woodward from his article, Killing Time. Woodward is interested in researching the problem using something called "Mach's principle" something I will mention briefly later on. Woodward says:

But even when the principle of relativity is construed narrowly, as in special relativity theory (SRT) so that its GRT generalization and Mach's principle are excluded, one is led from the absence of absolute simultaneity to the view that, in Weyl's [1949] words, "Reality simply is, it does not happen." That is, the past, present, and future all objectively exist. It is all fixed. There is no free will.

And of course if it is all fixed, this is where people really get disturbed. If all the matter is fixed from the beginning then people start to think that there is no room for free will! And people really want to hold on to the idea of free will. I believe the problem for free will is easy to overcome but that is a topic for later.

If all this sounds pretty screwy, OK, sure it does sound screwy but special relativity makes specific preditions about certain things and these things do indeed happen. Modern particle accelerators are designed to accelerate sub-atomic particles to nearly the speed of light. Some of these particles are unstable and they break down very quickly into other particles when they are just sitting still but when they are in the accelerator traveling at nearly the speed of light time for them slows down and from outside the accelerator they end up lasting longer. Plus of course special relativity produced what must be the most famous physics equation in the world, E = mc². This makes possible atomic bombs and nuclear reactors.

To sum up the situation it goes like this. Once upon a time it was obvious to people standing on the Earth that the Earth was not moving but the sun was moving across the sky. This gave us the perspective that the Earth was at the center of the universe and the sun and all the stars moved around the Earth. It took many years of careful measurements and thinking before people realized that there was a better perspective on the situation, it was better to see the sun at the center of the solar system with the Earth rotating on its axis and revolving around the sun. Likewise, for a very long time people have thought that the only thing that existed was the present moment, the past was gone, the future was not out there yet and events develop at random in an uncoordinated way. But once again scientists made careful measurements and did some thinking and found out that there is a better perspective from which to view the world. This is sometimes called the timeless or atemporal perspective.

There is more science that supports this stunning result from special relativity but special relativity just by itself shows the basic idea. If you're interested in the additional science read on. If you're already stressed-out over science you can skip right on to the section called The Haunted Mansion and you won't be missing any key ideas.

Einstein published his theory of General Relativity in 1916. It has to do with space, time and objects that are accelerating relative to each other. If you take the equations of general relativity and just want to deal with objects that are not accelerating relative to each other, you just want to deal objects that are just moving at constant speeds relative to each other you get the equations of Special Relativity. So the two fit together very neatly and of course special relativity gets its name from it being a special case of general relativity.

General relativity (and for that matter, special relativity as well) united time and space into a single entity called space-time. It turns out that with general relativity space-time is curved by the mass of objects. When we have an object being moved by "the force of gravity" all that is happening is that the object is moving along a straight line in space-time that is curved. General relativity improves on Sir Isaac Newton's simpler theory of gravity. Newton's theory predicted the orbits of most of the planets but it failed to exactly predict the orbit of Mercury. General Relativity did explain the orbit of Mercury plus it predicted that light from a star would be bent by the sun. The bending was quickly confirmed in 1919.

General Relativity makes many other predictions as well. One is that time slows down in a gravitation field and experiments have proven this as well. It predicts the existence of black holes and astronomers seem to have found some out there. It also makes the interesting prediction that the universe is expanding from a huge explosion (the Big Bang) at the beginning of time and this actually seems to show up in various Bible passages where the passages talk about how God stretched out the heavens. (See the page Genesis Interpretations.) General Relativity is as well established as any law in Science.

General Relativity says other interesting and more complicated things as well. General Relativity re-enforces the idea that the past, present and the future all exist "at once" and so that time as we normally think about it just does not exist.

There is a nice explanation of the consequences of the equations of general relativity in the book, The River of Time by physicist Igor Novikov. In chapter 15, "Can We Change the Past?" Novikov explores the time travel paradoxes that are so often used in science fiction. Like the problem of the person who travels back in time and decides to kill himself or maybe to kill his grandfather to prevent himself from even being born. Novikov does it with a simpler set of problems. First let there be a wormhole in space where A is the entry point to the wormhole in the present. The wormhole connects with a location in the future called B. The equations of general relativity allow for such a wormhole to exist although they by no means require them to exist, maybe they exist and maybe they don't. Maybe people can engineer such a wormhole and maybe they can't. But now let's have a billiard ball moving through time and space past location A and toward the location B. It enters the wormhole at B and travels backward in time to emerge at A. An important thing to notice here is that if time travel is true it does away with the intuitive idea that the past is gone, the future is not yet here and only the present exists. If time travel is true clearly the past and the future have to "out there", they have to be as real as the present.

Now could the ball from the future come out of A in such a way as to hit the ball in the present and knock it off it's path to the location B? No! Things happen only once and it all has to be planned from the beginning. You could arrange for the ball from the future to knock it's earlier self into the wormhole at B however. That would work. Novikov says that if there's going to be a collision between the younger ball and the older ball then:

The effect of the collision should have been taken into account from the very beginning. Indeed the ball moves once only, and we cannot treat it's motion as collisionless once, and then as motion with collision. This means that the effect of the future (i.e. of the older ball arriving from the future) on the event must be considered from time 0.

The billiard balls could also be spaceships. The spaceship comes goes into B and comes out at A in time to see it's earlier self. Could a mad man on the spaceship now destroy the ship before it enters the wormhole at B? Or could the new version of the ship engage a tractor beam to force it away from the wormhole B? Or could the tractor beam be used to force the spaceship to enter the wormhole B? Or the billiard balls could be a person traveling through time. Could the person go into B, come out at A and try to kill his earlier self before he enters wormhole B? All these cases except for one cannot happen. Novikov does not say how a force might intervene to keep them from happening but if you realize that the whole universe has to be designed to be consistent from the very beginning you see that the paradoxes can't happen. The situations have to be designed from the very beginning. The only case that could happen is if the spaceship from the future used its tractor beam to force its earlier self into the wormhole B.

It all implies that the future and for that matter the past must all be out there "at once". People can IMAGINE things happening twice and they can say such things in words but in reality everything happens only once and so because of their imagination and how people use words the paradoxes you get in time travel stories can be talked about but they simply can't happen.

Novikov goes on to consider yet more cases but in all cases Novikov shows how the past, present and future must all be consistent. One statement of that bottom line is:

Therefore, with the time machine, today's events must be consistent with (i.e. be determined by) not only the past but also the future! I formulated this self-consistency principle many years ago and now it appears to have been accepted by everyone who works in the time machine field. Recently I and my colleagues were able to prove that this principle can be deduced from the fundamental laws of physics.

These results specifically deal with time travel of course. Maybe there is no time travel going on in the universe. So far there are no known instances of things traveling backward in time. The examples are nice however because again they show how you have to figure out the history of the universe before you make it just like you have to write a book before you print it. Some experts in the field think time travel can indeed happen. If it did happen it would be subject to the consistency requirements noted above. And the consistency requirements match up with the block model of the universe we saw from special relativity.

Another odd result that came from the study of the equations of general relativity came from mathematician Kurt Gödel. He found a solution to Einstein's equations where a universe could just naturally bend back on itself. So you could get on a spaceship, travel consistently into the "future" and yet end up in the "past". What then does time mean? How could you say that the universe was so many years old when you travel into the "future" and end up in the "past"? How can you say there is a past, a present and a future? Our universe does not have to be like that but again it implies that the whole universe is something that is just "out there" not something that develops moment by moment. That whole way of thinking is just obsolete.

Quantum mechanics deals with the movements of the very tiniest particles. These tiny particles don't move around the way large, heavy objects do, sometimes these "particles" behave like a wave and sometimes they behave like a particle. Physicists quickly found equations that give the right answers but the way these tiny particles move and interact with each doesn't seem to make any sense at all. One equation is the Schrödinger wave equation from Erwin Schrödinger and it is the one that is talked about most often because it is a differential equation and physicists have always been used to dealing with differential equations. The other form is a matrix equation from Werner Heisenberg. But in both cases no one can tell what the heck is really going on because it is all so strange compared to the world that we are used to. The famous quote from physicist Richard Feynman is that "Nobody understands quantum mechanics."

There have been two responses to this mystery. One response is to just say, oh, hey, the equations work and let's not worry about why. The other response of course is to try and make sense of it all. The funny thing is though that people have come up with many different interpretations of quantum mechanics but none of them is very satisfying to everyone. Some of the interpretations have an almost mystical quality about them. Some of the interpretations point us toward the idea that, again, the past present and future must all be out there at once. Since relativity is telling us the same thing I believe these interpretations should be taken very seriously.

First let's catalog some of the interpretations of quantum mechanics. One new unconventional viewpoint comes from recent work by physicist Mark Hadley where Hadley sort of derives QM from GR by assuming particles are built a certain way. Hadley's proposed solution is especially interesting because it comes about by allowing particles to move backward in time along tiny wormholes like those described in the billiard ball example we've already seen for general relativity. For more on his theory see: A Gravitational Explanation of Quantum Theory. This is a very new idea and so far no one been able to derive either the Schrödinger or Heisenberg equations from it. It would certainly satisfy people who want a nuts and bolts interpretation of the world. The existence of these tiny wormholes would tell us that the past, present and the future are all out there and real at once and the present is formed jointly from the past and future.

Physicist John Cramer has an interesting interpretation of quantum mechanics that came about by merging relativity and quantum mechanics, see: The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Cramer stresses that it is only an interpretation of what the equations say but the interpretation also uses the idea that the past, present and future are all out there at once.

Philosopher Huw Price argues in his paper, A Neglected Route to Realism About Quantum Mechanics, that if there is backward causation (the future influences the present and past) happening in the quantum world that would also explain the mysteries. Other physicists also consider this an option. Again, this implies that the past, present and future are all out there at once. For more on Price's idea, see also:

• Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point by Huw Price
• Huw Price - Home Page
• Locality, Independece and the Pro-Liberty Bell by Huw Price
• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-backwards.

One of the features of quantum mechanics is that the movement of particles is not deterministic. That means that you can never predict for certain where a moving particle is going to end up. As I said in the introduction, it is a flip of a coin or a roll of the dice. Some people who write about God and quantum mechanics will speculate that this is a good deal. They say then that it is possible that what you decide now is not just determined by your past. It means you are not a robot. It means you can break free of your past. Personally I think this is shallow thinking on their part. Determinism in the physical world will not eliminate free will since there is another more interesting way out of the free will problem. Some of the physicists who developed quantum mechanics never liked the uncertainty of it all. Einstein's famous quote is: "God does not play dice". Another physicist who believed that quantum mechanics ought to be deterministic was David Bohm. He managed to prove that beneath the rules of quantum mechanics there could be yet deeper rules that produced what looked like randomness. He also split the Schrödinger equation into two parts, one that showed that the tiniest particles behaved just like big things and a second part that showed a "quantum force" that moved them around in odd ways. It is easy to speculate that the quantum force is what the religious community calls "spirit". Bohm also propsed that behind the scenes there was some kind of structure of information that told them where to move. Bohm called it the implicate order. Bohm also compared the world to a hologram in which everything across all of space and time is related to everything else across all of space and time. This makes me think of what we get from special relativity where for a photon everything is at the same place at the same time. If there is a perspective where everything is at the same place at the same time then of course everything is related to everything else.

The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says that at every point in the history of the universe a particle can go any which way and in fact the particle splits up into a huge number of particles each of which go off into a separate universe of its own. Using this interpretation of quantum mechanics there is a different version of you in each one of those universes. As the differences accumulate over time the yous in each universe become more and more different. Many science fiction stories have been based on this idea when someone discovers a way to to travel between universes. One of the classics is when the good Enterprise of the Federation is in orbit around a planet, Kirk uses the transporter just when something strange is happening and Kirk ends up on a different version of the Enterprise where the ship is part of Earth's empire, the crewmembers are mostly evil and Spock has a beard. For some phenomena this intepretation works pretty nicely. A lot of critics don't like it. For instance they often ask where is the energy coming from to create all that extra matter. One of the founders of this interpretation was physicist John Wheeler but he later gave up on it because he said it carried too much metaphysical baggage. Other physicists still take it seriously.

The Copenhagen Interpretation comes from Neils Bohr. It was the first one that seemed to most physicists to actually give them a reliable way of thinking about quantum mechanics and so it is the one that is the most widely taught and believed. The Copenhagen Interretation is perhaps the most mystical one of all. It says that there is no real world out there but nevertheless every time you make a measurement or observe a phenomenon you do get some specific numerical value that pops up out of a fog of possibilities. Critics have come up with numerous objections to this interpretation. One really amazing idea that is implied by the Copenhagen interpretation is that an object such as the moon is not really there unless someone looks at it and then and only then does it become real. And of course after you stop looking at it it becomes unreal again! Even more interesting, would the Universe itself be here if no one was looking at it? Does it mean that there is a someone outside the Universe looking at it so as to make it real? Anyway with the Copenhagen interpretation some people think that it goes against the block universe interpretation because the particles do not take on their real values until the measurement is made. So the universe is unfinished until the measurements are made. On the other hand to be able to predict how an experiment will turn out the Copenhagen interpretation says that you have to look at the entire experiment and that means looking into the future to see where the wave or particle or whatever it is will end up. So form the very beginning the Copenhagen interpretation really had the idea that the future is already out there.

There are a lot of experiments that people will discuss when talking about these interpretations of quantum mechanics but we will try and keep the details to a minimum. The most famous one is called the double slit experiment where you pass photons or some other sub-atomic particles through a pair of slits. On the other side of the slits there might be equipment set up to detect a particle or equipment set up to detect a wave. It turns out if you're looking for a particle you find it. If you're looking for a wave the experiment finds a wave. What then are these "particles"? The Copenhagen intepretation says that they're nothing until you look and it depends on how you choose to look.

Plus the double slit experiment gets worse than that. Physicists think that the particle ought to decide whether it will behave "like a wave" or "like a particle" when it passes through the slits. It really should behave like a wave and pass through both slits or like a particle and pass through only one slit when it is there at the slits. But it won't know how to behave until the end of it's journey when it encounters the equipment on the other side! Yet the particles seem to know their future! Besides the double slit experiment there are a number of other similar experiments that all show the same thing. These types of experiments are all called delayed choice experiments. In these experiments the particles always seem to know what is out there in their future and then they behave accordingly. In Schrödinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality p 142) Gribbin describes one experiment where this was shown in a laboratory setting and then talks about how in principle the same experiment could be done using light from a distant quasar. Speaking of this proposed experiment Gribbin says:

The whole Universe seems to 'know', in advance, what experiment an individual is going to carry out, perhaps on a mountain top in Chile, some time in the next few years.

Then there is a type of experiment called an EPR experiment. These experiments originated as a thought experiment devised by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (hence EPR). Over the years a number of them have been proposed but now some of these experiments have actually been done and they always confirm the predictions of quantum mechanics. One experiment in particular by Alain Aspect and others in the 1980s is a dramatic one and so that is one that is always quoted so we will look at it. It is also a delayed choice type of experiment.

The Aspect experiment starts with a source that emits a pair of photons. Photons have a property called polarization and when this pair of photons is formed the values of their polarizations will be related to each other in a certain way. After this pair is created one photon runs to the left and the other one runs to the right. As they near their destinations an optical switch changes their directions at random and each photon ends up at one detector or another detector. At the end of their journeys their polarizations are measured. It turns out that what you measure on one side of the experiment affects the results you get on the other side of the experiment. The polarizations of the two photons are related in the way quantum mechanics predicts so the conclusion is that somehow each one "knows" what is happening to the other one. The experiment was repeated on a larger scale using optical fibers to carry the photons to the detectors with the detectors 11 kilometers, or seven miles apart by physicist Nicolus Gisin and his team at the University of Geneva. They got the same results, the particles "know" what's happening at the other end even though they are very far apart.

According to the Copenhagen intepretation as the photons travel along don't have any value for their polarizations at all. But when you measure the polarization of one it finally takes on a value and it automatically forces the other one to take on a related value. The mystery as it turns out for people who believe in the Copenhagen interpretation is that the other photon gets its value instantly. It gets it even faster than if the first photon sends a message to the other one at the speed of light. And so this seems to be a dramatic proof of non-locality, that is, something that happens to one particle at one point in space and time has an effect on another particle so far away in space and time that a message can't get to the other one at the speed of light. Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance" and he really did not like it.

These EPR experiments always bothered me as well because I never could see why people went around saying that the particles did not get their values immediately, right then and there when they are first formed. (So Einstein agrees with me!) After a long time I finally figured out they were getting it from the Copenhagen interpretation. If your mind is stuck on the Copenhagen Interpretation it really does look mysterious. It really looks like there is a problem. And then it really does look like what happens on one side of the experiment is instantly known by the photon on the other side of the experiment. Of course if you're like me (and Einstein) you'll be stuck with trying to explain how the values the photons get right then and there when they were formed can be coordinated with what happens to them later on. Einstein proposed that there are hidden variables, that is, there are physical properties for the photon that have not yet been discovered and observed that determine this and that therefore quantum mechanics has to be incomplete.

Huw Price and others have offered the idea that backward causation is at work. Backward causation would work like this. Suppose we make a movie of the photons forming at the source and moving on to their final destinations where they are measured. Now run the movie in reverse. You end up seeing the photons coming together at the time they were formed and then what values they have at that time are determined by what will (or should we say did) happen to them in the future. This is a rather neat solution that Price says people typically ignore because it seems to mean that the future is out there and it is already determined and that would mean that there is no free will. Of course this would fit neatly with the block universe idea we get from special relativity.

In a related experiment Antoine Suarez and another team did something even more complicated. They repeated the Gisin experiment but set the photon detectors into motion, something that brings in special relativity with more complicating factors. Besides the strangeness in Special Relativity that we have already seen another strange effect is possible. With observers moving relative to each other it is possible for one observer to say that event A happened before event B while another observer will say that B happened before A. Both of them are equally valid perspectives and there is no perspective that physicists can find that is any better. In this experiment they arranged for detectors on each end of the experiment to be the first one to make an observation. So on the left side of the experiment the measurement of one photon will force the photon on the right side to be something or other. But from the right side it will appear as if the measurement of the photon there will force the one on the left side to take on a value. This experiment exposes a serious flaw with the Copenhagen Interpretation. The CI says that one forces the other but from special relativity we know that there is no perspective that is better than any other one. The CI implicitly says there will be a best perspective in every experiment but when you look at this experiment you see that there just can't be. Using that CI perspective they thought that the correlations between photons would disappear but as it turned out they still got the results predicted by quantum mechanics. In the paper, Entanglement and Time by Suarez, he reports:

In the nonlocal quantum realm there is dependence without time, things are going on but the time doesn't seem to pass here.

If the speed of quantum information is indeed infinite, or non-existing we are left with two remaining alternatives: either space-time or free will is an illusion. I am tempted to vote for the first one!

I don't have a PhD type background in physics so my opinion does not count for much but I see this experiment as showing that quantum mechanics is consistent with special relativity and it is a stunning confirmation of the block universe where everything is set up to work in advance, indeed it shows that things MUST be set up in advance.

For more on this experiment see the Center for Quantum Philosophy.

Quantum mechanics is an unsettled subject because nobody agrees on what is really going on with sub-atomic particles. Normally people have said that all the interpretations work and there is no way to choose one over the other however some experiments in recent years have been interpreted to cast doubt on the Copenhagen Interpretation. One in particular, the Afshar experiment has been interpreted as disproving the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Many Worlds Interpretation, see: A Farewell to Copenhagen by Cramer. Cramer and some other physicists agree with this result while others do not. In addition Cramer says the Afshar experiment is consistent with his Transactional Interpretation. Physicists are continuing to try and figure out what's really happening in these quantum mechanical experiments. At any rate it looks like quantum mechanics is telling us the same thing that special relativity is telling us: the past, present and future are all out there at once and it's all fixed.

A physicist named John Bell didn't like the Copenhagen interpretation either and he set out to study quantum mechanics, EPR experiments and what they imply. He discovered an amazing result called Bell's Theorem but this never led to an answer that satisfied him or anyone else.

People have simplified Bell's Theorem down to pretty easy to understand examples, for instance, there is this description from physicist David M. Harrison at the University of Toronto: Bell's Theorem. Here I am going to follow some of his derivation in an even more simplified version in order to spare readers the details. The derivation of Bell's Theorem begins with an entirely reasonable inequality that looks something like:

stuff >= 0

stuff + newstuff >= newstuff

1/2 >= 5/9

• Logic is valid.
• There is a reality separate from its observation
• Locality.

People who look at the list usually assume that their logic must be correct, so most people figure that that's not the problem. The part about there being a reality separate from its observation is something people usually assume as well. So in the end most people think that Bell's Theorem is telling us that locality is not true. Somehow the quantum mechanical particles manage to communicate with each other instantly. From non-locality it follows that the past, present and future are all out there and things are all related. One physicist, Henry Stapp has called this the greatest discovery in the history of Science.

Even though Bell's theorem has been puzzling Bell did realize that there was one simple way out. From Schrödinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality, page 177 of the 1995 hardcover edition from Little, Brown and Company Gribbin says:

'You know,' he (Bell) told Paul Davies, 'one of the ways of understanding this business is to say that the world is super-deterministic.' In other words, absolutely everything is predetermined, including the experimenter's choice of what measurements to make in the Aspect experiment. If free will is a complete illusion, this gets us out of the crisis.

This observation by Bell then takes us right back to the result that we had from special relativity but it is difficult for physicists to swallow. Here are some pages with more perspective on Bell's Theorem:

• Gettingit.com: Reality Ain't What It Used To Be
• Spooky Action at a Distance: An Explanation of Bell's Theorem.

There is no final opinion on the meaning of Bell's Theorem yet. The most commonly believed one right now is that non-locality is true and everything across all of space and time is connected to everything else. So all of the universe across all of space and time really all has to be there at once, it's the same result we see from relativity.

Relativity, quantum mechanics and Bell's Theorem are gigantic developments in modern science but there are some smaller ones that also point to superdeterminism. One of them is Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory. The problem Wheeler and Feynman were working on was to figure out why charged particles like electrons and protons resist being moved. Of course uncharged particles also resist being moved due to the fact that they have mass but charged particles resist being moved even more than uncharged particles. Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory manages to get just the right value for this resistance by assuming that when the charged particle is moved it sends out waves into the past and the future. Maxwell's equations have a solution that shows that electromagnetic waves travel into the future and into the past. Physicists had always ignored the wave that would be traveling into the past because no one is seeing such things and that didn't even make sense to people at the time anyway. As it turns out though these waves traveling into the past interact with all the other charged particles in the universe, all of which jiggle a little and put out still more waves that travel around the universe into the past and the future. When all the results are totaled up they show that the waves traveling into the past get cancelled out by all the waves radiating around the universe and that's why we never see them, we only see the waves that travel into the future. This whole scheme only works if the universe is closed so that waves going into the future are all eventually reflected back into the past. So this is more evidence for everything being out there at once.

Earlier I quoted from Woodward who mentioned Mach's principle. Mach's principle was a proposal by Ernst Mach that says that when you try and push on an uncharged object and it resists, the resistance is coming from all the other matter in the universe, even from very distant galaxies. So this is quite similar to Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory. Some physicists believe that General Relativity includes Mach's principle and others do not. Woodward is trying to find evidence for this effect. On the other hand some other researchers have another idea for the origin of inertia so this issue is not settled yet.

One other small item is the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. For many years physicists have thought that there should be an improved version of general relativity where values are quantized as they are in quantum electrodynamics. Quantum electrodynamics is the improved quantum mechancial version of Maxwell's classical that describe electricity and magnetism. Even though physicists have been searching for a long time this improved theory has not been found although the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is one result from this search. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation resulted from combining General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. The amazing result is that there is no time in this equation! Most physicists have no idea what to make of that although one, Julian Barbour has written the book The End of Time and his proposal is that the universe is like the collection of frames that you see on movie film. Each frame is static but when taken together you see time and motion.

We are on the verge of a major revolution in our concept of what the world is like. Relativity, quantum mechanics, various experiments and Bell's Theorem all point to a world that has been fixed ahead of time. The idea that things happen at random just doesn't fit in with the results of modern physics. But as usual people can't quite believe the implications. Once upon a time it looked so much like the sun went around the Earth that people had trouble accepting the new idea. And they couldn't believe that the continents move. People have had trouble with the speed of light being the same for every observer and now they're having trouble with what that implies. The new viewpoint is good for traditional Biblical views of God and how He operates as we will see in the next chapter, The Haunted Mansion (below).

From the block model perspective, how did the Universe come about? When people talk about the Big Bang they say that it was the beginning of time and space but this is a perspective that comes from the old view of the world where we think about things moving forward in time, where the past is gone, the future is not yet and only the present exists. But the block model shows us the universe is a package deal. You get all of it all at once, complete and fully formed from time 0 out to as far as time goes and that might be all the way out to infinity. You might say that the Big Bang at the "beginning" of space and time is just a tiny fraction of what was created, it is merely a sort of fireworks display that is "celebrating" all the creation from there out to infinity.

For the creation of the universe from the block model perspective you can use the analogy that creating the universe must be like writing and publishing a book. Suppose you're writing a novel about a person named John. Suppose John does not have a car in chapter 1. In chapter 3 John wrecks his car. This forces him to somehow acquire a car in chapter 2. There may be details toward the end of the book that forces the author to go back and make changes earlier in the book. If you're writing a murder mystery you have to be careful to plant all the clues in the early chapters so that when you see the result at the end, you get to say, "Well, of course, that was obvious. Why didn't I notice it?" At any rate an author has to go back and forth until the book is done and then when it is finished the WHOLE THING gets published. Once it is published people can see it. In terms of the universe you might figure that some very great and powerful intelligence did all the "writing" and then when "the book" was finished it was "published" and made real. (The need for a great and powerful intelligence to design this universe will become apparent in a moment.)

Now after this great intelligence "published" the universe we find ourselves moving through time in the direction of increasing time where the Big Bang would be the beginning at time 0. We might say that the universe is like an amusement park ride such as the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyworld. First you build the ride and only then can people use it. The ride requires chairs pulled along by chains that are connected to wheels that turn. Now think of the chair that you are in as "the present". Just below the floor and ahead of your chair "in the future" is a wheel used to pull you along and below the floor just behind your chair "in the past" is a wheel that is also used to move the chain around. The whole mechanism would not work at all unless there was "a present", "a past" and "a future". (Think of how the universe would not "work" for photons unless the past, present and future were all out there at once.) At any rate when the ride is built people move along the finished product to see what is there and what they see was all planned in advance. The universe is more complicated though in that everyone gets a different trip through it.

One of the things we notice about our universe is that it is fairly complicated. How did it get to be this way? Why shouldn't the universe be an absolutely bland and boring collection of particles moving around at random? Or maybe if it had stars and planets why would there be something as complicated as life? Long ago ordinary people would look at the world and conclude that it must have been created by some very intelligent being or beings. In some cultures they had creation myths involving all sorts of gods. In the Bible creation came about through one all-powerful God.

In modern times many people believe in the evolution of life by chance however the block universe kills this idea in a single stroke because there is no such thing as chance. Everything had to be in place from the very beginning or you wouldn't have a universe at all. Just think about the whole universe with all it's life just happening by chance. What is the chance that all those various DNA codes happened by chance? For that matter think of the "man-made" objects you find in the universe, like cars, television sets and computers, they had to flash into existence at once as well as the life forms. What is the probability that all the life and all these complex "man-made" objects we now have on Earth, and have had in the past and will have in the future just flashed into existence across all of space and time? Of course it is absurdly small. The odds don't favor intelligent looking designs at all, the odds favor absolutely boring, bland and unremarkable chaos. When you view the world in the classical old physics way where the world is developing step by step you can imagine evolution happening (even if the math says it is wildly improbable) but since everything just is and it is out there "at once" there is just no time for evolution to act. All the intelligent designs we find in the world had to just happen instantly because they all have to be there at once. The world simply is not the way evolutionists imagine it to be because nothing is happening at random. It is only our warped perspective on the universe that makes us think that things can happen at random. Notice though that superdeterminism does not prohibit a pattern where we see evolution happening as we move from the past to the future, it is just that whatever evolution through time shows up had to be planned in advance. Thus with superdeterminism evolution by design may be true but evolution by chance cannot be true. Also please notice that whereas these results from modern physics are telling us that creation happened it does not imply that young Earth creationism is true only that some sort of creation is true. Darwinian style slow evolution could still be true but it would be evolution that is done by design, not by chance.

Of course a lot of people would still really want to believe in evolution by chance and they'd be looking for a way to evade the problem. One recourse is that they could propose that some sort of organization took place behind the scenes in some extra dimension(s) of time and space and then for some reason or reasons a design there was finished and then that design flashed into existence as our universe (our universe from beginning to end). But this produces two new problems. First they'd still be stuck with trying to explain how the complex DNA code was embedded in these unknown laws of nature that produced the physical universe. Also how did this process know how to build cars, television sets and computers and all the other machinery you find in this world? There is just so much complexity found in DNA and the rest of the world it is impossible to believe that some simple unknown laws of nature could produce them.

Second of course if you have to resort to something happening behind the scenes before the physical universe appears you have in effect proposed something like the spiritual world that you find in the world's various religions. This spiritual world would be necessary to produce the physical world. Plus this spiritual world must be radically different from the physical world and the laws of physics that we have in this physical world since a physical world like ours simply can't produce the designs that we see. Somehow intelligence can occur spontaneously in the spiritual world. The most zealous evolutionists are typically atheists and proposing a spiritual realm to account for the physical universe would be deeply disturbing to them. And so we have the surprising result that superdeterminism and life taken together argue for the existence of some realm other than the physical universe. It implies something like the spiritual world that the world's religions have always believed in. And of course it follows that there must be at least one very great and powerful intelligence in that spiritual world.

Another way for true believers in evolution by chance to try and evade the problem is of course is to deny the physics. They can just ignore the facts and hope that something will come along to disprove superdeterminism. This is extremely hard to do. The physics that implies superdeterminism has been around for up to 100 years. It has been verified over and over using objective numerical measurements. Special relativity fits in with the rest of physics and it even produced the famous result, E=mc² that made possible the atomic bomb and nuclear reactors. Many developments in modern physics all point to the same result. It is ironic that believers in evolution often say that evolution is as well established as the law of gravity because the law of gravity in the form of general relativity is one of the results that shows that evolution by chance is impossible. If the law of gravity is true then evolution isn't true!

True believers in evolution might also try to take refuge in the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics where every different world that can possibly happen does happen. The problems with that are that first of all the many worlds interpretation was invented to account for the strange results of quantum mechanics but since the strange results can be accounted for with superdeterminism there is no need for the many worlds interpretation. Second when you have to invent the idea that there are all those other universes out there yet there is no way to detect them it's just like proposing that there are invisible pink elephants flying around the room. The most zealous evolutionists are typically atheists and they will go around telling you that there is no need to invent God or spirits or a spirit world to account for life on Earth, material evolution is all that is needed. Then they go and quote the principle of Occam's razor where it says that the best explanation is the simplest one, the one with the fewest number of additional assumptions. They'll tell you that since life can be explained without inventing a God or a spiritual world that's the best explanation. So if they have to invent the idea that there are all those universes out there that we can't detect they are simply violating Occam's razor, one of the principles they are very fond of using. Inventing the idea that there are all those universes out there is just like inventing God.

There is one final theory where evolutionists could try to seek comfort. Some physicists propose that every so often space-time thins out to the point where another Big Bang type explosion takes place. They propose that in each Big Bang a different universe with slightly different characteristics pops up but since this goes on forever and ever eventually one like ours with life in it will pop up. The problem with this idea is that this proposal still does not take into account the block universe. Every "new" universe still has a connection to every other universe so the whole package of them must all pop up at once, it is not a one at a time thing at all where each universe is separate. So all in all there is just no way for believers in evolution by chance to win.

There are interesting implications that follow from this model of the universe. The powerful intelligence isn't just placing matter at specified locations. It is designing lives. For instance there is the well-known composer Ludwig von Beethoven. In 1826 he was a great composer, but then to be a great composer in 1826 you have to be a pretty great composer in 1825, almost as good in 1824 and so on, back in time to the point where Beethoven the child first hears music from a piano. At that time the child Beethoven has to fall in love with the piano so he can do what it takes to become the great composer he will be in the future. Notice that he has to be made to fall in love with music and that this love for music can be described as a gift. His DNA even had to be just right so that he would go deaf in later years.

There are other examples of designing lives as well. From time to time wars happen on Earth. One side wins and the other other side loses. The outcome was chosen in advance so that the matter could all be placed in the right places at the right time. This means that for the generals involved the winner will have to make the right choices and have all the right resources to win the war and the loser will have to make a wrong choice and/or not have all the right resources needed to win. So it follows that some of our decisions now are based on what will happen in the future. The great intelligence then appears to be the true source of intuition, inspiration, talent and luck. For a less violent example say there is a person with a lot of money they want to invest in the stock market. If in the future the person is going to be rich then in the present the person will "have a gut feeling" to buy a particular stock that later on will skyrocket in value. The gut feeling and the subsequent forture that is made are once again gifts. Of course, if in the future the person is supposed to be poor the person will get a gut feeling to buy a particular stock that crashes. :-) Since the pursuit of money just for the sake of money is an empty thing the person who loses all that money may be getting the gift of understanding that trusting in money is not a good idea. In other cases some people will be given the gift of hitting 60+ home runs in a year. Another will be given the gift of making the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl. Other people will be given the gifts of intelligence, curiousity, free time and education necessary to get Nobel Prizes in physics for "their" great discoveries, discoveries they were set up to make from the very beginning. Many people get better gifts than riches, intelligence and Nobel Prizes, they get a loving family. Some people might say they don't get any gifts at all.

As Science marched on the early human idea that the world was created by a God or gods was discredited for a while but now the results of modern physics take us right back to the idea that there is a spiritual world with a God or gods who are responsible for creating this world. The physics does not tell us who created it and why. The next item to think about then is to wonder what this intelligence is like and why it created this world.

First it is time to look at the problem of free will. Free will is one of the major reasons why physicists have been reluctant to embrace the new perspective of the world that we have from modern physics. Certainly they are quite right, IF the world is composed of just matter. For instance here is what Woodward says at the end of his Killing Time article:

The almost universal reaction I have found to the irrelevance of "free will" entailed by the physics presented here is: "If the future already objectively exists, why should I bother to do anything about it [exercise judgment and discretion in my actions]? It will happen however it already is anyway." The exception to this response is that of lawyers, who see a novel defense ploy in claiming non-responsibility due to the inevitability of reality. ["I couldn't help it; it was my fate. The laws of physics are responsible for my actions."] Does the inevitability of the future absolve us of responsibility for our actions? Of course not. Should we all stop striving to secure whatever future we want, because the future that will occur objectively already exists? No. What we are -- past, present and future -- is our choices. Choices, however, that in some real sense we have already made. Sounds positively Calvinistic, doesn't it?

Philosopher Huw Price argues in chapter 9 of his book, Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point that it is still possible to have free will. At this time, I don't see how he can claim that if a person is only a material mass of particles and a person's decisions depend on the particles which have all been determined in advance. In fact I have to say the same thing about Woodward's position too. My own thought is that it is the placement of matter that is fixed, but if people have a soul, something not made of matter, it can still leave them with free will and God is in a privileged position where he can know what each free soul decides and then He built the physical world around souls and their hopes, prayers and decisions. Remember that from the perspective of a photon everything is at the same place at the same time. If the Creator has that perspective then with everything in front of him all at once it becomes easier to understand how the Creator can manage to work out a unique life for everyone based on their freely made decisions. If you really think you are free then your freedom is actually an argument that people really do have a soul. My guess is that Woodward and Price are actually thinking the freedom comes from a soul as well but they are afraid to say it.

Well, at any rate if you choose to assume that the conclusion is that the world is fixed and there is no free will you can stop there. Well, almost stop there. You do need to explain a few details. If the Creator's purpose was to, say, simply do an artwork that it could admire for all eternity you'd have to say it failed at certain places. There are many beautiful features of this world, there are animals, plants, flowers, butterflies, sunsets, beautiful beaches and mountains with snow on them that are indeed worth looking at for a while. But there is also a lot of ugliness in this world too. There's death. There are diseases that make people suffer a lot before they die. There are people hating and killing each other. There are a great number of natural disasters. Why is there so much pain and suffering? Why doesn't that super intelligence care about us? I suppose someone could just answer that the great intelligence in creating the world was simply "writing a book" or "painting a painting" to amuse itself and that would be the end of it.

Or something more could be going on. When a person goes out and writes a book it is not normally just for themselves, normally it is for other people to read and enjoy and perhaps learn from. Of course the Biblical answer is that God created people to have fellowship with Him for all eternity but that all people here reject him at least to start with. His purpose for this world is then to teach us about God and ourselves and to give us a chance to choose to have fellowship with Him or to go off on our own and do our own thing. You know if God is really a nice guy and He cares about us (and He should be a nice guy and care about us, right?) He's got an awful lot of explaining to do. And the God of the Bible does exactly that in the Bible. Exactly what He wants is a long story and I present it in The Logic of the Biblical Doctrine. but before going there let's take a brief look and see what the God of the Bible has to say about His creation of the world and whether or not it matches up with the results of modern physics.

To start with we have from Ephesians 1:4-6:

Long ago, even before he made the world, God chose us to be his very own, through what Christ would do for us; he decided to make us holy in his eyes, without a single fault - we who stand before him covered with his love. His unchanging plan has always been to adopt us into his own family by sending Jesus Christ to die for us. And he did this because he wanted to.

and also verse 2:10:

It is God himself who has made us what we are and given us new lives from Christ Jesus; and long ages ago he planned that we should spend these lives in helping others.

You saw me before I was born and scheduled each day of my life before I began to breathe. Every day was recorded in your Book!

... [God] speaks of future events with as much certainty as though they were already past.

Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. He existed before God made anything at all and is supreme over all creation. Christ is the one through whom God created everything in heaven and earth. He made the things we can see and the things we can't see - kings, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities. Everything has been created through him and for him. He existed before everything else began, and he holds all creation together.

God chose him for this purpose long before the world began, but now in these final days, he was sent to the earth for all to see. And he did this for you.

From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries.

There is one other curious detail from the Bible that may be relevant to superdeterminism as well. People have wrestled with various interpretations of the Creation Story found in Genesis ever since Science found out the world was pretty old and people have apparently been around for a very long time. I cover this in more detail in another chapter, Genesis Interpretations however there is an interesting point in Genesis 1 that can be interpreted as pointing to superdeterminism. Most of Genesis 1 talks about how God created the universe and the Earth and He talks about it from the point of view of human beings who are moving forward in time. The curious detail has been a problem since before evolution became popular. It is how God describes how he made human beings, what we have in Genesis 1:27 is:

So God made man like his Maker. Like God did God make man. Man and maid did he make them.

Some other additional evidence is that in the Bible God manages to tell us about the future before it happens. Many of the prophecies have already come true and there are many more that seem to be relevant to our time and so they seem to be on the verge of coming true. Bible prophecies are never quite as obvious as you'd like them to be and there is a reason for this that is related to physics of the universe.

When it comes to telling us about the future God has a problem like the billiard ball example of Novikov noted above. In the Novikov example a physical object from the future has a profound influence on the same physical object in the past. When it comes to Bible prophecy God is passing information about the future back into the past. This can have major effects on what people decide to do. It has to be passed in such a way that it produces just the right future. Thus God can't be too precise about telling us the future because what he says influences people's behavior. So if he said the Anti-Christ starts business on a certain date then it's pretty likely the Anti-Christ won't set up business on that date. A compromise has to be reached between making the prophecy obvious and making it vague enough not to ruin the future. And it still has to be obvious enough so that some people may be able to see it ahead of time and it has to be very obvious after the specified event actually happens.

In summary there is quite a lot of evidence that the great and powerful intelligence that created this world is the God of the Bible. Of course some people may still not like to believe it and opt for believing that some other God or gods created the world.

This new view of the world that we get from modern science is telling us that there is a spiritual realm "out there" outside the physical universe and that spiritual world has at least one great and powerful intelligence in it. There is evidence that suggests that the great and powerful intelligence is the God of the Bible. It suggests that if you think you're free it is only because you have a soul or spirit and it tells us how God can know the future. In the next chapters we will be looking at what the God of the Bible is up to, why he created the world, why he created us and why the world is such a mess.

Here are some serious online papers that mention the superdeterminism idea:

Are the Past and Future Really Out There by James F. Woodward from Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie 28, 549-568 (2003). [Invited paper for a commemorative issue honoring the 60th anniversary of the completion of Olivier Costa de Beauregard's doctoral work with Prince Louis de Broglie.] (Woodward is pursuing the issue using Mach's principle.)

For one, see Flat Spacetime Gravitation with a Preferred Foliation by Pitts and Schieve, see pages 6 and 7 where they write:

One also knows that the experiments violating the Bell inequalities are compatible with the orthodox relativity if one is prepared to embrace "superdeterminism" [46-49], which violates the inequalities by introducing correlations between the hidden variables and the detector settings. By positing a common cause for these correlations, one can preserve orthodox relativity, the Aspect experiments notwithstanding. Because the GHZ theorem involves similar locality assumptions to those involved in Bell's theorem [50], we suspect that it can be subverted analogously. However, this view's demanding philosophical underpinnings, such as its denial of (libertarian) free will and evident need for an all-determining Agent to correlate the initial conditions of the world, might limit its appeal (see, e.g., Bell's attitude [51] (pp. 100-103, 110, 154)).2

1 Free will faces a potent long-standing conceptual objection that an action that isn't fully caused is to that extent merely random and thus un-free [52-54], so the denial of free will might be inevitable on other grounds. If so, then the entrance fee for superdeterminism will decrease.

2 On the other hand, the 3 major monotheistic traditions all have (or had) strands that affirm theological determinism: Pharisaic Judaism [55], Reformed/Calvinist Christianity, and Islam. That there might be a natural affinity here is suggested by the language (e.g., ( [47]) about events being "already 'written in a book'." The resemblance to Psalm 139:16 (NASB) cannot be accidental:

Thine eyes have seen my unformed substance; And in Thy book they were all written, The days that were ordained for me, When as yet there was not one of them.

For another, see Do We Really Understand Quantum Mechanics by Laloe, especially page 49.