The EPR paradox, Bell's inequality, and the question of locality
arXiv:0902.3827 · doi:10.1119/1.3243279
Abstract
Most physicists agree that the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bell paradox exemplifies much of the strange behavior of quantum mechanics, but argument persists about what assumptions underlie the paradox. To clarify what the debate is about, we employ a simple and well-known thought experiment involving two correlated photons to help us focus on the logical assumptions needed to construct the EPR and Bell arguments. The view presented in this paper is that the minimal assumptions behind Bell's inequality are locality and counterfactual definiteness, but not scientific realism, determinism, or hidden variables, as is often suggested. We further examine the resulting constraints on physical theory with an illustration from the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics -- an interpretation that we argue is deterministic, local, and realist, but that nonetheless violates the Bell inequality.
28 pages; change of title, minor wording changes, move to TeX format
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- Entanglement Symmetry, Amplitudes, and Probabilities: Inverting Born's Rule
- A Note on Bell's Theorem Logical Consistency
- Dissipative dynamics of quantum correlation quantifiers under decoherence channels
- An Elementary Proof That Everett's Quantum Multiverse Is Nonlocal: Bell-Locality and Branch-Symmetry in the Many-Worlds Interpretation
- Ghostly action at a distance: a non-technical explanation of the Bell inequality
- Probability, Preclusion and Biological Evolution in Heisenberg-Picture Everett Quantum Mechanics
- Bell vs Bell: a ding-dong battle over quantum incompleteness
- Conservation of correlation in measurement underlying the violation of Bell inequalities and a game of joint mapping