Quantum non-locality-it ain't necessarily so ...

Author(s): Marek Zukowski, Caslav Brukner
Abstract: Bell's theorem is 50 years old. There still remains a controversy about its implications. Much of this controversy has its roots in confusion regarding the premises from which the theorem can be derived. Some claim that a derivation of Bell's inequalities requires just a locality assumption and nothing more. Violations of the inequalities are then interpreted as a 'non-locality' or 'quantum non-locality'. We show that such claims are unfounded and that every derivation of Bell's inequalities requires a premise-in addition to locality and freedom of choice-which is either assumed tacitly, or unconsciously, or is embedded in a single compound condition (such as Bell's 'local causality'). The premise is equivalent to the assumption of the existence of additional variables which do not appear in the quantum formalism (in the form of determinism, joint probability for outcomes of all conceivable measurements, 'additional causes', 'hidden variables', 'complete description of the state' or counterfactual definiteness, etc). A certain irony is that perhaps the main message of the violation of Bell's inequalities is that our notion of locality should be based on an operationally well-defined no-signalling condition, rather than on local causality.
Organisation(s): Quantum Optics, Quantum Nanophysics and Quantum Information
External organisation(s): Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ÖAW)
Journal: Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical
Volume: 47
No. of pages: 10
ISSN: 1751-8113
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1088/1751-8113/47/42/424009
Publication date: 10-2014
Peer reviewed: Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012: 103025 Quantum mechanics
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas: General Physics and Astronomy, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, Statistics and Probability, Mathematical Physics, Modelling and Simulation
Portal url: https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/0055b3b0-929f-4e12-93e4-57c5cdda1b2a