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I personally believe that there is a very strong case in favor of true randomness in QM but not being a physicist I would like to know from experts if there is a consensus about this.

@John Rennie: this question is different because it specifically asks about the consensus of the true randomness, not about the true randomness itself.

Qmechanic
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benji
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There is a consensus that the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM implies that some measurements have true randomness in them.

The actual mathematics of QM has no randomness at all. However, it is difficult to tie QM into the reality we intuitively believe we perceive (classical mechanics). The interpretations are the step which links the non-random mathematics of QM to the real world experimental results. The Copenhagen Interpretation does include true randomness. However, there are other interpretations, such as the Many Worlds Interpretation and the Bohem-deBroglie Pilot Wave interpretation, which are purely deterministic.

Cort Ammon
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  • Roughly how much of the scientific community "supports" the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM then? – benji Aug 04 '17 at 06:23
  • Deterministic or not whatever quantum mechanical theory you're discussing it comes down to photons and photon emission is random. – Bill Alsept Aug 04 '17 at 07:18
  • We have determined, via experiments demonstrating violation of Bell's Inequality, that quantum mechanics is either non-deterministic and local, or deterministic and non-local. Most people are content to sacrifice determinism to keep locality, though there certainly are deterministic non-local formulations of QM that explain things equally well. – probably_someone Aug 04 '17 at 08:18
  • @safesphere right but I am not asking about the truth, only about whether or not there is consensus. – benji Aug 04 '17 at 15:35
  • @ben I think the best phrasing I could give is "The consensus in the scientific community is that there is not a need for there to be a consensus in the scientific community over whether there is randomness in QM or not." It's simply not that important to them, and current theories suggest there will never be an experiment that can demonstrate one way or the other. If you are interested in just raw numbers, currently the Copenhagen Interpretation is most popular, but that's for historical reasons, not because anyone believes it is a superior model. – Cort Ammon Aug 04 '17 at 16:01