2006/07/07 by Travis Norsen · 3 voices
Arts and Humanities · Physics and Astronomy · Psychology · #Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology #Philosophy, Science, and History #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s10701-007-9104-1
published as Foundations of Physics, Vol. 37 No. 3, 311-340 (March 2007) · Revised version, forthcoming in Foundations of Physics
arxiv created 2006/11/16 · openalex publication_date 2007/02/03 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2020/07/02 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
We examine the prevalent use of the phrase ``local realism'' in the context of Bell's Theorem and associated experiments, with a focus on the question: what exactly is the `realism' in `local realism' supposed to mean? Carefully surveying several possible meanings, we argue that all of them are flawed in one way or another as attempts to point out a second premise (in addition to locality) on which the Bell inequalities rest, and (hence) which might be rejected in the face of empirical data violating the inequalities. We thus suggest that the phrase `local realism' should be banned from future discussions of these issues, and urge physicists to revisit the foundational questions behind Bell's Theorem.