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Physics-Uspekhi

Bell's paradoxes without the introduction of hidden variables

Aleksandr V. Belinskii

Published Apr 30, 1994• 19 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A hidden-variable theory is the traditional, but not unique, basis for constructing various types of Bell's theorem. The starting point may also be a recognition of the existence of a positive-definite probability distribution function. This assumption alone is used to formulate and prove Bell's paradoxes of different types. A specific example is used to show that a formal quantum calculation can sometimes give negative values of the joint probabilities that are used in the proof. An attempt is made to identify the physical meaning of this result and an algorithm for determination of negative joint probabilities of this type is proposed.

DOI
10.1070/pu1994v037n04abeh000024

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A hidden-variable theory is the traditional, but not unique, basis for constructing various types of Bell's theorem. The starting point may also be a recognition of the existence of a positive-definite probability distribution function. This assumption alone is used to formulate and prove Bell's paradoxes of different types. A specific example is used to show that a formal quantum calculation can sometimes give negative values of the joint probabilities that are used in the proof. An attempt is made to identify the physical meaning of this result and an algorithm for determination of negative joint probabilities of this type is proposed.
The conceptually puzzling features of quantum mechanics as a statistical theory all have their source in the impossibility of relating the probability assignments defined by the quantum state to distributions over determinate values of the physical magnitudes. While some interpretations of quantum mechanics, as well as “hidden variable” modifications of the theory, have proposed several constructions for assigning values to magnitudes (beyond the value assignments defined by the quantum state alone), a variety of theorems exist which impose severe restrictions on such theoretical constructions. This note will deal with Bell's proof (in [2]), that any hidden variable theory satisfying a physically reasonable locality condition is characterized by an inequality which is inconsistent with the quantum statistics. Bell's result has initiated a series of experiments designed to refute the entire class of local hidden variable theories. We show that Bell's inequality actually characterizes a feature of hidden variable theories which is much weaker than locality in the sense considered physically motivated.
Hidden variable theories, as encouraged by the EPR paper, that proliferated in the 1950s, were taken quite seriously in some academic quarters, despite the existence of the 1932 von Neumann ‘proof’ that supposedly showed that these hidden theories were incompatible with the stochasticity of quantum mechanics. In 1964, John Bell, a particle theorist, reexamined the von Neumann proof, found it ‘wanting’, and offered his own proof that reaffirmed that hidden variable theories were incompatible with quantum mechanics. Bell added a twist: his proof was in the form a neat inequality theorem that was easy to comprehend and became an instant success. Bell's theorem led to a new generation of experimentalists to rediscover quantum entanglement, and to conduct these experiments in the visible spectrum, to test for evidence of hidden variable theories. The results were negative thus reaffirming the validity of quantum mechanics and its indeterminacy. In this chapter the premises of Bell's theorem are explained as well as its link to the probabilities of quantum entanglement.
Bell's paradoxes, due to the fundamental properties of light and the nature of the photon, are discussed within a single framework with a view to checking the hypothesis that a stationary, non-negative, joint probability distribution function exists. This hypothesis, related to the local theory of hidden parameters as a possible interpretation of quantum theory, enables experimentally verifiable Bell's inequalities to be formulated. The dependence of these inequalities on the number of observers V is considered. Quantum theory predicts the breakdown of Bell's inequalities in optical experiments. It is shown that as V increases, the requirements on the quantum effectiveness of the detector, η, are reduced from η > 2/3 at V = 2 to η > 1/2 for V → ∞. Examples of joint probability distribution functions are given for illustrative purposes, and a way to resolve the Greenberg–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) paradox is suggested.
Bell's theorem proves the incompatibility between quantum mechanics and local realistic hidden-variable theories. In this paper we show that, contrary to a common belief, the theoretical proof of Bell's theorem is not affected by counterfactual reasoning. Then, we demonstrate that the experimental verification of this theorem may be affected in an unknowable way by our ignorance about the probability distribution of the hidden variables. Our study is based on the standard theory of random variables, and lays the groundwork for a critical rethinking of Bell's theorem and its consequences.
This article takes up a suggestion that the reason we cannot find certain hidden variable theories for quantum mechanics, as in Bell’s theorem, is that we require them to assign joint probability distributions on incompatible observables. These joint distributions are problematic because they are empirically meaningless on one standard interpretation of quantum mechanics. Some have proposed getting around this problem by using generalized probability spaces. I present a theorem to show a sense in which generalized probability spaces can’t serve as hidden variable theories for quantum mechanics, so the proposal for getting around Bell’s theorem fails. 1 Introduction2 Bell’s Theorem and Classical Probability Spaces 2.1 Bell’s derivation of the Bell inequalities 2.2 Pitowsky’s derivation of the Bell inequalities3 Incompatible Observables4 Generalized Probability Spaces5 A ‘No-Go’ Theorem6 Conclusions