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arXiv:2301.10240 · Quanta

How Does Nature Accomplish Spooky Action at a Distance?

Mani Lal Bhaumik

Published Dec 23, 2018• 8 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The enigmatic nonlocal quantum correlation that was famously derided by Einstein as "spooky action at a distance" has now been experimentally demonstrated to be authentic. The quantum entanglement and nonlocal correlations emerged as inevitable consequences of John Bell's epochal paper on Bell's inequality. However, in spite of some extraordinary applications as well as attempts to explain the reason for quantum nonlocality, a satisfactory account of how Nature accomplishes this astounding phenomenon is yet to emerge. A cogent mechanism for the occurrence of this incredible event is presented in terms of a plausible quantum mechanical Einstein–Rosen bridge. Quanta 2018; 7: 111–117.

DOI
10.12743/quanta.v7i1.82

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The enigmatic nonlocal quantum correlation that was famously derided by Einstein as "spooky action at a distance" has now been experimentally demonstrated to be authentic. The quantum entanglement and nonlocal correlations emerged as inevitable consequences of John Bell's epochal paper on Bell's inequality. However, in spite of some extraordinary applications as well as attempts to explain the reason for quantum nonlocality, a satisfactory account of how Nature accomplishes this astounding phenomenon is yet to emerge. A cogent mechanism for the occurrence of this incredible event is presented in terms of a plausible quantum mechanical Einstein–Rosen bridge. Quanta 2018; 7: 111–117.
Despite their Nobel Prize-winning empirical falsification, the interpretation of the Bell inequality remains a subject of controversy. This article discusses and attempts to clarify the reasons John S. Bell and A. Einstein claimed that quantum entanglement implies puzzling nonlocal correlations that Einstein famously termed ``spooky action at a distance.'' The issue remains notoriously controversial and has roughly divided the scientific community into localists and nonlocalists. Without taking a stance on either side in the long-standing, polarized debate, we examine Bell's actual argument, highlighting how it differs from the current orthodoxy.
Despite their Nobel Prize-winning empirical falsification, the interpretation of Bell's inequality remains a subject of controversy. This article discusses and attempts to clarify the reasons John S. Bell and A. Einstein claimed that quantum entanglement implies puzzling nonlocal correlations that Einstein famously termed ``spooky action at a distance.'' The issue remains notoriously controversial and has roughly divided the scientific community into localists and nonlocalists. Without taking a stance on either side in the long-standing, polarized debate, we examine Bell's actual argument and highlight how his reasoning differs from the current orthodoxy.
I feel compelled to respond to the frequent references to spooky action at a distance that often accompany reports of experiments investigating entangled quantum mechanical states. Most, but not all, of these articles have appeared in the popular press. As an experimentalist I have great admiration for such experiments and the concomitant advances in quantum information and quantum computing, but accompanying claims of action at a distance are quite simply nonsense. Some physicists and philosophers of science have bought into the story by promoting the nonlocal nature of quantum mechanics. In 1964, John Bell proved that classical hidden variable theories cannot reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics unless they employ some type of action at a distance. I have no problem with this conclusion. Unfortunately, Bell later expanded his analysis and mistakenly deduced that quantum mechanics and by implication nature herself are nonlocal. In addition, some of these articles present Einstein in caricature, a tragic figure who neither understood quantum mechanics nor believed it to be an accurate theory of nature. Consequently, the current experiments have proven him wrong. This is also nonsense.
In their well-known paper, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen called the nonlocal correlation in quantum entanglement a "spooky action at a distance." If the spooky action does exist, what is its speed? All previous experiments along this direction have locality and freedom-of-choice loopholes. Here, we strictly closed the loopholes by observing a 12 h continuous violation of the Bell inequality and concluded that the lower bound speed of spooky action was 4 orders of magnitude of the speed of light if Earth's speed in any inertial reference frame was less than 10(-3) time the speed of light.
In the 80 years since the seminal Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) paper, physicists and philosophers have mused about the `spooky action at a distance' aspect of quantum mechanics that so bothered Einstein. In his formal analysis of EPR-type entangled quantum states, Bell (1964) concluded that any hidden variable theory designed to reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics must necessarily be nonlocal and allow superluminal interactions. This doesn't immediately imply that nonlocality is a characteristic feature of quantum mechanics let alone a fundamental property of nature; however, many physicists and philosophers of science do harbor this belief. Experts in the field often use the term `nonlocality' to designate particular non-classical aspects of quantum entanglement and do not confuse the term with superluminal interactions. However, many physicists seem to take the term more literally. I endeavor to disabuse the latter of this notion by emphasizing that the correlations of Bell-type entanglement are a result of ordinary quantum superposition with no need to introduce nonlocality. The conclusion of the EPR paper wasn't that quantum mechanics is nonlocal but rather that it is an incomplete description of reality. For different reasons, many physicists, including me, agree with Einstein that quantum mechanics is necessarily an incomplete description of reality.
The long-standing puzzle of the nonlocal Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations is resolved. The correct quantum mechanical correlations arise for the case of entangled particles when strict locality is assumed for the probability amplitudes instead of locality for probabilities. Locality of amplitudes implies that measurement on one particle does not collapse the companion particle to a definite state. Sixty five years ago, the most significant paper questioning a fundamental aspect of quantum phenomena was written by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) [1]. They addressed the question whether the wave-function represented a complete description of reality in quantum mechanics, and argued that it didn’t. Bohr’s reply to this paper [2] was not sufficient to resolve the fundamental issues raised by EPR. Decades later, Bohm rephrased the EPR problem [3] in terms of particles correlated in their spin and this helped enormously in analyzing the problem with clarity. John Bell analyzed the EPR problem in the early sixties and established the Bell’s inequalities obeyed by