John S. Bell’s concept of local causality

By Travis Norsen. 2007

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

John Stewart Bell’s famous theorem is widely regarded as one of the most important developments in the foundations of physics. Yet even as we approach the 50th anniversary of Bell’s discovery, its meaning and implications remain controversial. Many workers assert that Bell’s theorem refutes the possibility suggested by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) of supplementing ordinary quantum theory with “hidden” variables that might restore determinism and/or some notion of an observer-independent reality. But Bell himself interpreted the theorem very differently—as establishing an “essential conflict” between the well-tested empirical predictions of quantum theory and relativistic local causality. Our goal is to make Bell’s own views more widely known and to explain Bell’s little-known formulation of the concept of relativistic local causality on which his theorem rests. We also show precisely how Bell’s formulation of local causality can be used to derive an empirically testable Bell-type inequality and to ...

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, History and Philosophy of Science, Physiology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a48d66777a0d4875b8eee08b0ded17ee0a979478

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In History and Philosophy of Science

In Physiology

Citations in the corpus

The lesson of causal discovery algorithms for quantum correlations: causal explanations of Bell-inequality violations require fine-tuning (2012, background): “[16] and [3] for more concerning Einstein’s arguments on completeness and locality.)”