Archives by date

You are browsing the site archives by date.

A reasonable thing that just might work

Daniel Rohrlich Submitted to “Quantum Nonlocality and Reality – 50 Years of Bell’s theorem” In 1964, John Bell proved that quantum mechanics is “unreasonable” (to use Einstein’s term):  there are nonlocal bipartite quantum correlations.  But they are not the most nonlocal bipartite correlations consistent with relativistic causality (“no superluminal signalling”):  also maximally nonlocal “superquantum” (or “PR-box”) correlations are consistent with… Read more →

Weekly Papers on Quantum Foundations (52)

This is a list of this week’s papers on quantum foundations published in the various journals or uploaded to the preprint servers such as arxiv.org and PhilSci Archive. Beyond the cosmological standard model Physics Reports on 2014-12-26 10:09pm GMT Publication date: Available online 25 December 2014 Source:Physics Reports Author(s): Austin Joyce , Bhuvnesh Jain , Justin Khoury , Mark Trodden After… Read more →

Recollections of John Bell

Michael Nauenberg Submitted to “Quantum Nonlocality and Reality – 50 Years of Bell’s theorem” It is a pleasure to contribute to this anthology some of my recollections of John Bell. I first met him at SLAC, when we were visitors during 1964-65 when he was on leave from CERN, and I was on leave from the Columbia University Physics Department…. Read more →

The Assumptions of Bell’s Proof

Roderich Tumulka Submitted to “Quantum Nonlocality and Reality – 50 Years of Bell’s theorem” While it is widely agreed that Bell’s theorem is an important result in the foundations of quantum physics, there is much disagreement about what exactly Bell’s theorem shows. It is agreed that Bell derived a contradiction with experimental facts from some list of assumptions, thus showing… Read more →

What Retrocausal Explanations Look Like

Ken Wharton Submitted to “Quantum Nonlocality and Reality – 50 Years of Bell’s theorem” While it is generally known that retrocausal models can provide an account of Bell-inequality violations in terms of spacetime-local beables, new models can now explicitly show how this comes about. By analyzing a simple local-beable model that precisely recovers the quantum joint probabilities for measurements on… Read more →

Weekly Papers on Quantum Foundations (51)

This is a list of this week’s papers on quantum foundations published in the various journals or uploaded to the preprint servers such as arxiv.org and PhilSci Archive. Quantum space-time of a charged black hole. (arXiv:1412.6055v1 [gr-qc]) gr-qc updates on arXiv.org on 2014-12-20 2:26am GMT Authors: Rodolfo Gambini, Esteban Mato Capurro, Jorge Pullin We quantize spherically symmetric electrovacuum gravity. The algebra of Hamiltonian… Read more →

Non-local beables

I would like to begin with Bell’s remark on the possibility that the beables are non-local, which Tim Maudlin quotes. “Of course, we may be obliged to develop theories in which there are no strictly local beables. That possibility will not be considered here[1].” When I read that yesterday I was astounded because it made me realize that ever since encountering Bell’s theorem as… Read more →

Bell on Bohm

Sheldon Goldstein Submitted to “Quantum Nonlocality and Reality – 50 Years of Bell’s theorem” A memorial conference for John Bell, open to the public, was held at Rutgers University around 20 years ago. I gave there a short talk on Bell’s views about David Bohm’s “hidden variables” formulation of quantum mechanics, a version of quantum mechanics often called the de… Read more →

Strengthening Bell’s Theorem: Removing the Hidden-Variable Assumption

Henry P. Stapp Submitted to “Quantum Nonlocality and Reality – 50 Years of Bell’s theorem” The Bell’s theorem proofs are rightly identified as proofs of the incompatibility of “local realism” with the predictions of quantum mechanics. But “local realism” brings in both alien-to-quantum-theory classical concepts and also an “outcome independence” condition whose inclusion nullifies those theorems as possible proofs of… Read more →

Weekly Papers on Quantum Foundations (50)

This is a list of this week’s papers on quantum foundations published in the various journals or uploaded to the preprint servers such as arxiv.org and PhilSci Archive. Maximum Tension: with and without a cosmological constant. (arXiv:1408.1820v3 [gr-qc] UPDATED) gr-qc updates on arXiv.org on 2014-12-14 1:30am GMT Authors: John D. Barrow, G. W. Gibbons We discuss various examples and ramifications of the… Read more →