Editorial: Towards a Local Realist View of the Quantum Phenomenon

Quantum mechanics (QM) stands apart from other physical theories inasmuch as its elegant and powerful mathematical formalism conceals the lack of a unique, complete, and coherent conceptual frame in which to accommodate the physical elements that should be put into correspondence with the mathematical objects. Excessive mathematization, blurred physics, and the abandonment of principles on which the remainder of physics rests—such as realism, determinism, locality, objectivity or descriptiveness—have been a discomforting signature in the legacy of QM as we know it. An aim of this Research Topic was to promote discussions of the physics of QM as seen from different perspectives. Authors were invited to take a closer look beyond the formal apparatus, and point towards new paths for a more physical and realist reframing of QM. The 15 articles included in this issue represent different endeavors to identify underlying physical laws and causal connections, propose a possible “subquantum” theoretical description, revise the rules of correspondence between theory and observation, or offer logical arguments viz. concrete models that question the impossibility theorems. The introductory statement by Gerard ’t Hooft (Hooft) carries the torch for many an article in this issue: “Without wasting time and effort on philosophical justifications and implications, we write down the conditions for the Hamiltonian of a quantum system for rendering it mathematically equivalent to a deterministic system.” The natural flow and simplicity of ’t Hooft’s article are signatures of great mastership that raises the question why we have considered in the past all these philosophical justifications. The answer is, of course, that they trace their origin to the writings of Heisenberg, Bohr, and Einstein. There exists in addition a massive literature on Bell-type inequalities that claims to go beyond philosophy. Bell’s theorem has been circumvented by extreme interpretations of experiments with atomic and subatomic entities. One extreme is the increasingly fashionable inference of superluminal “influences” (not information transfer), and the other extreme is the super-determinism as discussed in more palatable forms in the article of Hossenfelder and Palmer (Hossenfelder and Palmer). Bell’s theorem has come to represent a major stumbling block in the search of local realist and deterministic descriptions of our world. Several contributions to this issue, however, demonstrate that it does not constitute the unmovable obstacle that it was thought to be, because it is not only difficult to relate to any actual experiments but also contains questionable physical assumptions. Oaknin (Oaknin) demonstrates that the derivation of Bell-type inequalities suffers from deep physical problems related to the gauging of Bell’s variables, which requires an absolute frame of Edited and reviewed by: José S. Andrade, Federal University of Ceara, Brazil