English

Hidden Variables and the Two Theorems of John Bell

Quantum Physics 2018-03-01 v1 History and Philosophy of Physics

Abstract

Although skeptical of the prohibitive power of no-hidden-variables theorems, John Bell was himself responsible for the two most important ones. I describe some recent versions of the lesser known of the two (familar to experts as the "Kochen-Specker theorem") which have transparently simple proofs. One of the new versions can be converted without additional analysis into a powerful form of the very much better known "Bell's Theorem", thereby clarifying the conceptual link between these two results of Bell.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1802.10119,
  title  = {Hidden Variables and the Two Theorems of John Bell},
  author = {N. David Mermin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.10119},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

27 pages, no figures. An initial page explains why I am posting this 25-year-old article