Does CSD make new predictions?

The short answer

A blunt question deserves a blunt answer. At present CSD names no experiment whose outcome it predicts differently from quantum mechanics. The corpus's empirical suite consists of formal twins of the flagship experiments, interference of single particles, the Bell tests of correlations between distant particles, the quantum eraser, interaction-free measurement and the rest, and each is reproduced within the programme's own framework.

What the programme claims instead is a different kind of gain, the same predictions from less. Fewer postulates go in, the probability rule is computed rather than assumed, and measurement is described by one law of motion instead of two, where standard quantum mechanics uses one rule for evolution between measurements and a separate rule for what happens at a measurement. And the whole reconstruction is machine-checked, which no rival interpretation currently offers.

Whether genuinely new physics emerges, in the form of departures from quantum mechanics in regimes the reconstruction constrains, is treated in the papers as owed future work and not as a present claim, and a reader should hold the programme to exactly that standard.

The longer answer

The empirical layer is designed as reproduction with receipts. Every flagship quantum experiment in the suite has a CSD-side twin, and the validation ledger records what each twin actually establishes, so the strength of each reproduction can be read off rather than assumed. The contrast with rival interpretations is stated as interpretive, as the corpus's own comparison entries say that no experiment currently distinguishes the positions.

The disciplined phrasing matters because overclaiming is the commonest failure of reconstruction programmes, so the repository's claims guard exists to keep the public statements at exactly the strength of the theorems, neither stronger nor weaker.

What is actually proved

The Empirical tree has two branches. The QM branch reproduces the standard results in the operational formalism, and the CSD branch re-derives the same experiments through the volume machinery, the double-slit, the singlet and CHSH, GHZ, CGLMP, the eraser and Elitzur-Vaidman among them. The chain capstones connect frequencies to Born weights on the programme's own route.

Related entries

• What exactly is machine-checked in CSD?Every theorem in the CSD corpus is verified by a proof assistant from zero imported axioms, and the list of what such checking can't certify is published alongside it.
• Spontaneous collapse (GRW)Spontaneous collapse theories change the equations of quantum mechanics and can be killed by experiment, and CSD, so far, can't be, and its own documentation says so.
• Record light coneRecords are safe from distant meddling by theorem, as anything that happens outside the light cone can shift the outcome written into the arena's fibre by no more than a bound that collapses factorially with distance.
• Interaction priceSwitching on an interaction between field modes makes local quantities spread at a rate proportional to the coupling, and the corpus proves the rate is exact, at most twice the coupling times the elapsed time, and at least a fixed fraction of it.
• If CSD is deterministic, where do probabilities come from?They come from ignorance of the exact starting point, as the dynamics never rolls dice, and the probabilities are the sizes of the sets of microstates a preparation can't tell apart, measured with a ruler nobody was free to choose.