Why This Nobel Prize Winner Thinks Quantum Mechanics is Nonsense

Gerard ’t Hooft’s alternative to standard quantum mechanics replaces probabilistic measurement outcomes with a fully deterministic framework—at the cost of introducing “superdeterminism,” where experimental choices are correlated with the system being measured from the universe’s earliest conditions. The central dispute is not whether quantum experiments violate Bell-type inequalities (they do), but what assumptions must be true for those inequalities to hold. ’t Hooft argues that one key assumption—free, independent choice of measurement settings—cannot survive a deterministic, local theory.

In conventional quantum mechanics, systems are described by a wave function (often written as ψ) that encodes probabilities rather than definite properties. Measurement forces an update commonly called “collapse,” which effectively happens everywhere at once, a feature that bothered Einstein because it appears to evade locality. ’t Hooft’s route back to determinism is to remove collapse as a fundamental ingredient: the outcomes are fixed by underlying laws, but observers can’t predict them because they lack information about the relevant initial state.

That determinism collides with Bell’s theorem only if measurement settings are treated as freely chosen and statistically independent of the hidden variables governing the system. Bell’s theorem constrains correlations in any theory that is both local and deterministic (plus extra assumptions). Experiments violate the resulting inequality, leading most physicists to conclude that no local deterministic theory can match reality. ’t Hooft’s counter is that the “extra assumptions” fail: in a deterministic universe, what experimenters choose is also determined, and therefore the measurement settings can be correlated with the system’s state. He emphasizes that this is not causal influence in the usual sense—rather, the correlations are already encoded in the initial conditions and must always line up with the measurement settings.

To ’t Hooft, the deeper issue is interpretational. The wave function used in standard quantum mechanics is a predictive tool, not the real state of affairs. He distinguishes between the usual wave function and an “ontological” wave function that is treated as real and yields 100% probabilities for specific outcomes. In this picture, classical-looking states—like a dead cat or a life cat—are real, while superposed combinations (dead-and-alive) are not.

The proposal is tied to a specific underlying model: the cellular automaton interpretation. The universe is imagined as built from extremely small, discrete, deterministic components evolving in discrete time steps with nearest-neighbor interactions, with emergent particles and even space arising from these local rules. ’t Hooft links this to the Planck scale (around 10^-33 cm) and draws a practical implication for quantum computing: because the ontological states available in such a model are fewer than standard quantum theory assumes, certain tasks—he singles out factoring large numbers—would not be achievable by quantum computers in the way current theory predicts. If engineers ever succeed at factoring million-digit numbers using quantum computers, he suggests the cellular automaton framework would be falsified.

The critique offered alongside the summary is that the cellular automaton component may be underdeveloped relative to the symmetry demands of Einstein’s theories, and that the ontological states—central to making the interpretation operational—are not specified in a way that lets outsiders determine what they are or how to use them. Still, the deterministic, local, superdeterministic reinterpretation remains a provocative attempt to reconcile quantum predictions with a classical-style reality—one that has largely been ignored despite ’t Hooft’s credentials and Nobel-level impact in particle physics.