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You don't need to understand even special relativity to learn about Bell's theorem. It's just about measurement settings and local influence. You're correct th
by n4r9 8y ago
You don't need to understand even special relativity to learn about Bell's theorem. It's just about measurement settings and local influence.
You're correct that non-local hidden variable theories are still plausible. Bohmian mechanics is the prominent example. In this case "locality" is the comfortable illusion that you drop. In Copenhagen it is a kind of realism. In Many Worlds it is the notion that an observation leads to a single result. There's no clear way to determine which of these is more like a "null hypothesis" than the others, so what tends to happen is that people gravitate towards one or another based on which of the illusions they're more okay with dropping.
It would be nice to be able to discriminate between interpretations based on experiment, and a little work has been done on this, but we're not really anywhere near there yet.
- posterboy 8y agoI wrote under the impression that locality would rely on a notion of space-time. wiki/Local_realism says as much. That then is one notion to knock down. The null hypothesis here would be non-locality. Unifying that with GR is the big problem, I hear, especially regarding gravity.
- n4r9 8y agoWithout some notion of space-time you could not have a meaningful notion of locality, therefore Bell's Theorem is a non-issue. But you don't need a relativistic space-time for Bell's Theorem, any space-time in which physical influences travel at a bounded speed will suffice. Bell's Theorem does, however, create an uneasy tension between quantum theory and special relativity. Tim Maudlin writes quite a good book about this called "Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity".