It is argued that Bell's nonlocality is a particular case of nonlocality at detection, which appears already in single-particle interference experiments. The unity of nonlocality and local causality is crucial to provide a consistent description of the world.
Bell's theorem is 50 years old. Still there is a controversy about its implications. Much of it has its roots in confusion regarding the premises from which the theorem can be derived. Some claim that a derivation of Bell's inequalities requires just locality assumption, and nothing more. Violations of the inequalities are then interpreted as ``nonlocality'' or ``quantum nonlocality''. We show that such claims are unfounded and that every derivation of Bell's inequalities requires a premise -- in addition to locality and freedom of choice -- which is either assumed tacitly, or unconsciously, or is embedded in a single compound condition (like Bell's ``local causality''). The premise is equivalent to the assumption of existence of additional variables which do not appear in the quantum formalism (in form of determinism, or joint probability for outcomes of all conceivable measurements, or ``additional causes`'', or ``hidden variables'', ``complete description of the state'' or counterfactual definiteness, etc.). A certain irony is that perhaps the main message of violation of Bell's inequalities is that our notion of locality should be based on an operationally well-defined no-signalling condition, rather than on local causality.
Introduction Fifty years after the publication of Bell's theorem, there remains some controversy regarding what the theorem is telling us about quantum mechanics, and what the experimental violations of Bell inequalities are telling us about the world. This chapter represents my best attempt to be clear about what I think the lessons are. In brief: There is some sort of nonlocality inherent in any quantum theory, and, moreover, in any theory that reproduces, even approximately, the quantum probabilities for the outcomes of experiments. But not all forms of nonlocality are the same; there is a distinction to be made between action at a distance and other forms of nonlocality, and I will argue that the nonlocality needed to violate the Bell inequalities need not involve action at a distance. Furthermore, the distinction between forms of nonlocality makes a difference when it comes to compatibility with relativistic causal structure. The Bell locality condition is a condition which, if satisfied, renders possible a completely local account of the correlations between outcomes of spatially separated experiments. Bell's theorem tells us that the probabilities that we compute from quantum mechanics do not admit of such an account. Modulo auxiliary assumptions that, in my opinion, should be noncontroversial, this yields the conclusion that there must be something nonlocal about any theory that yields the quantum mechanical probabilities or anything close to them. One way to violate the Bell locality condition – and this is the way that any deterministic theory must do it – is via straightforward action at a distance. However, we should also consider the possibility of a stochastic theorywith probabilistic laws that involve irreducible correlations. The sort of nonlocality inherent in such a theory involves relations between events that are significantly different from causal relations as usually conceived. Perhaps surprisingly, such a theory, unlike its deterministic cousins, need not invoke a distinguished relation of distant simultaneity. This makes a difference for the situation of the two sorts of theories vis-a-vis relativity. Though a deterministic theory can achieve the appearance of being relativistic, at the level of observable phenomena, it can do so only by introducing a preferred foliation and with it a causal structure at odds with relativistic causal structures. Things are otherwise with dynamical collapse theories.
Despite their Nobel prize-winning empirical confirmation, the interpretation of the Bell inequality remains controversial. By carefully analyzing Bell's work on nonlocality, we show how the correct appreciation of Bell's rationale calls for reformulating a widespread argument on quantum nonlocality, yielding a more consistent formulation of the problem. We delve into a formal proof of quantum mechanics' violation of local causality strikingly overlooked in favor of less appropriate arguments. For completeness, we also mention a few alternatives that may rationally justify considering quantum mechanics as a local theory.
Quantum nonlocality may be an artifact of the assumption that observers obey the laws of classical mechanics, while observed systems obey quantum mechanics. I show that, at least in the case of Bell's Theorem, locality is restored if observed and observer are both assumed to obey quantum mechanics, as in the Many-Worlds Interpretation. Using the MWI, I shall show that the apparently "non-local" expectation value for the product of the spins of two widely separated particles --- the "quantum" part of Bell's Theorem --- is really due to a series of three purely local measurements. Thus, experiments confirming "nonlocality" are actually confirming the MWI.
I have been arguing that quantum nonlocality, deeply entrenched in the present formalism of quantum mechanics and widely believed as a reality by physicists, is in fact absent. Spooky nonlocal state reduction is the most, and perhaps the only irrational feature of present day physics. There are experimental results that reject nonlocal state reduction at a distance. Also, there are arguments that show that signal locality itself can be violated if there is true nonlocal collapse of the wavefunction. The Bell's inequalities, the violation of which polarized physicists in favour of nonlocality, arise not due to nonlocality, but due to ignoring prior information on correlations encoded in the phase of local probability amplitudes. Here I discuss an experiment involving particles entangled in energy and time variables that shows that there is no nonlocal state reduction during measurements on entangled particles. Quantum mechanics is inconsistent if it includes the concept of wavefunction collapse as a physical process for entangled multi-particle systems.
Between 1964 and 1990, the notion of nonlocality in Bell's papers underwent a profound change as his nonlocality theorem gradually became detached from quantum mechanics, and referred to wider probabilistic theories involving correlations between separated beables. The proposition that standard quantum mechanics is itself nonlocal (more precisely, that it violates ‘local causality’) became divorced from the Bell theorem per se from 1976 on, although this important point is widely overlooked in the literature. In 1990, the year of his death, Bell would express serious misgivings about themathematical form of the local causality condition and leave ill-defined the issue of the consistency between special relativity and violation of the Bell-type inequality. In our view, the significance of the Bell theorem, in both its deterministic and stochastic forms, can only be fully understood by taking into account the fact that a fully Lorentz covariant version of quantum theory, free of action at a distance, can be articulated in the Everett interpretation. Introduction John S. Bell's last word on his celebrated nonlocality theorem and its interpretation appeared in his 1990 paper ‘La nouvelle cuisine’, first published in the year of his untimely death. Bell was careful here to distinguish between the issue of ‘no superluminal signalling’ in quantum theory (both quantum field theory and quantum mechanics) and a principle he first introduced explicitly in 1976 and called ‘local causality’ [1]. In relation to the former, Bell expressed concerns that amplify doubts he had already expressed in 1976. These concerns touch on what is now widely known as the no-signalling theorem in quantum mechanics, and ultimately have to do with Bell's distaste for what he saw as an anthropocentric element in orthodox quantum thinking. In relation to local causality, Bell emphasised that his famous factorizability (no-correlations) condition is not to be seen ‘as the formulation of local causality, but as a consequence thereof’ and stressed how difficult he found it to articulate this consequence. He left the question of any strict inconsistency between violation of factorizability and special relativity theory unresolved, a not insignificant shift from his thinking up to the early 1980s.