English

The Scope and Generality of Bell's Theorem

Quantum Physics 2015-06-12 v2 History and Philosophy of Physics

Abstract

I present what might seem to be a local, deterministic model of the EPR-Bohm experiment, inspired by recent work by Joy Christian, that appears at first blush to be in tension with Bell-type theorems. I argue that the model ultimately fails to do what a hidden variable theory needs to do, but that it is interesting nonetheless because the way it fails helps clarify the scope and generality of Bell-type theorems. I formulate and prove a minor proposition that makes explicit how Bell-type theorems rule out models of the sort I describe here.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1212.4854,
  title  = {The Scope and Generality of Bell's Theorem},
  author = {James Owen Weatherall},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1212.4854},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

24 pages, no figures, forthcoming in Foundations of Physics