A Nobel laureate believes quantum mechanics actually is deterministic

If, like me, you're fascinated by quantum mechanics (or quantum physics, two words for same thing), you'll love an article that features an interview with theoretical physicist Gerard 't Hooft in the July/August 2025 issue of Scientific American, "Quantum Physics Is Nonsense."
Download Breakthrough Prize Winner Gerard ’t Hooft Says Quantum Mechanics Is ‘Nonsense’ | Scientific American

t' Hooft earned the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics and recently won a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics worth $3 million in recognition of his many contributions to physics throughout his career. So his views deserve serious consideration, even though — or because — what he said in the interview is a minority perspective on quantum mechanics.

For whereas the quantum realm has a well-deserved reputation for being mysterious, even a bit other-worldly, owing in part to the probabilistic nature of quantum phenomena that is at odds with the determinism evident in the everyday world, t' Hooft believes that further progress in quantum mechanics needs to be founded on a view that returns to the deterministic perspective that prevailed before the advent of quantum theory.

As you can read in this Google AI overview of the article, 't Hooft also takes issue with superposition in quantum mechanics. That's the notion that often is popularized as a cat being both alive and dead before  a box containing the cat is opened and it is known whether a random emission of a radioactive particle occurred that would kill the cat.

I liked the interview of 't Hooft because he isn't afraid to express a minority view about quantum mechanics. Of course, that's easier to do when you've had such a distinguished physics career. I have no idea if his view will turn out to be correct. But I like his style. Here's some quotations from the interview that I found particularly interesting from a quasi-philosophical perspective.

Many people continue to think the same way—and the way people now try to introduce new theories doesn’t seem to work as well. We have lots of new theories about quantum gravity, about statistical physics, about the universe and cosmology, but they’re not really “new” in their basic structure. People don’t seem to want to make the daring new steps that I think are really necessary.

…I think we have to start thinking in a different way. And I have always had the attitude that I was thinking in a different way. Particularly in the 1970s, there was a very efficient way of making further progress: think differently than your friends, and then you find something new!

I think that is still true. Now, however, I’m getting old and am no longer getting brilliant new ideas every week. But in principle, there are ways—in, one could argue, quantum mechanics, cosmology, biology—that are not the conventional ways of looking at things. And to my mind, people think in ways that are not novel enough.

…My way of thinking about the world, about physics, about the other disciplines related to physics is that everything should be much more logical, much more direct, much more “down to Earth.”

Many people who write papers on quantum mechanics like to keep some sense of mysticism about it, as if there’s something strange, almost religious, about the subject. I think that’s totally false.

Quantum mechanics is based on a mathematical method used to describe very ordinary physical effects. I think the physical world itself is a very ordinary one that is completely classical. But in this completely classical world, there are still too many things that we don’t know today; there are steps we’re basically missing on our path to deeper understanding.

…The Standard Model is based on quantum mechanics, and quantum mechanics tells you what happens when particles approach one another and scatter. But they can scatter in many different ways; they have a large number of choices about it, and the Standard Model doesn’t give any sound prediction there. It gives you only statistics.

The Standard Model is a fantastic theory that handles the statistics of what things are doing. But the theory never tells you with infinite precision which choice nature makes; it tells you only that these different possibilities are there at a certain probability amplitude. That is the world as we know it. That’s how we know how to phrase the laws of nature. But it’s not the laws of nature themselves.

…What you just said, that the questions are beyond our reach, is exactly what people said a decade and a century and a millennium ago. And of course, that was the wrong answer each time. We can answer these questions, but doing so requires lots and lots of science. Before Maxwell, nobody understood how exactly electric and magnetic fields hang together, and they thought, “Oh, this is impossible to find out because it’s weird!”

But then Maxwell said, no, you just need this one term, and then it all straightens out! And now we understand exactly what electric and magnetic interactions do. It’s simply not correct that you cannot answer such questions. You can, but you have to start from the beginning, like I said about quantum mechanics.

If you believe right from the beginning that quantum mechanics is a theory that gives you only statistical answers and never anything better than that, then I think you’re on the wrong track. And people refuse to drop the idea that quantum mechanics is some strange kind of supernatural feature of the particles that we will never understand.

No! We will understand, but we need to step backward first, and that’s always my message in science in general: before you understand something, just take a few steps back. Maybe you have to make a big march back, all the way back to the beginning.