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Physics Letters A

Local realism has not been refuted by atomic cascade experiments

Trevor W. Marshall, Emilio Santos, F. Selleri

Published Oct 1, 1983• 119 citations
Publisher
DOI
10.1016/0375-9601(83)90531-5

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I s it possible to bring experiments to bear on metaphysical theses such as realism? In recent developments in quantum mechanics particularly associated with the late John Bell it has been claimed that a certain type of realism, what is known as local realism, has indeed been refuted by a series of experiments, culminating in those carried out by Alain Aspect and his collaborators in Paris in 1982. Crudely local realism means in this context that atomic and subatomic entities, the subject matter of quantum mechanics, possess definite sharp values for all their attributes at all times, and, in addition, these attributes cannot be affected instantaneously by operations such as measurements performed on other microentities at different spatial locations from the one whose attributes are in question. In other words, realism is supplemented with a denial of the possibility of instantaneous action-at-a-distance. Now relativity theory, the other great pillar of modern theoretical physics, is standardly understood as committed to such a denial. So an experimental refutation of local realism would force us to give up either locality (the no-instantaneous-action-at-a-distance principle) or the realist thesis itself. The first horn of this dilemma is closed off by appeal to relativity theory, and so the conclusion of the argument would appear to be the refutation of realism.

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I s it possible to bring experiments to bear on metaphysical theses such as realism? In recent developments in quantum mechanics particularly associated with the late John Bell it has been claimed that a certain type of realism, what is known as local realism, has indeed been refuted by a series of experiments, culminating in those carried out by Alain Aspect and his collaborators in Paris in 1982. Crudely local realism means in this context that atomic and subatomic entities, the subject matter of quantum mechanics, possess definite sharp values for all their attributes at all times, and, in addition, these attributes cannot be affected instantaneously by operations such as measurements performed on other microentities at different spatial locations from the one whose attributes are in question. In other words, realism is supplemented with a denial of the possibility of instantaneous action-at-a-distance. Now relativity theory, the other great pillar of modern theoretical physics, is standardly understood as committed to such a denial. So an experimental refutation of local realism would force us to give up either locality (the no-instantaneous-action-at-a-distance principle) or the realist thesis itself. The first horn of this dilemma is closed off by appeal to relativity theory, and so the conclusion of the argument would appear to be the refutation of realism.
With Bell (1964) and his EPR-based mathematics contradicted by experiments, at least one step in his supposedly commonsense theorem must be false. Defining commonsense local realism as the fusion of local-causality (no causal influence propagates superluminally) and physical-realism (some physical properties change interactively), we eliminate all such contradictions and make EPR correlations intelligible by completing the quantum mechanical account in a classical way. Thus refuting the famous inequality at the heart of Bell's mathematics, we show that Bell's theorem is limited by Bell's use of naive realism. Validating the classical mantra that correlated tests on correlated things produce correlated results without mystery, we conclude that Bell's theorem and related experiments negate naive realism, not commonsense local realism.