On the locality of hidden-variable theories in quantum physics

Vandana Shiva

Roger Colbeck, Renato Renner

In [Physical Review Letters 101, 050403 (2008)], we showed that quantum theory cannot be explained by a hidden variable model with a non-trivial local part. The purpose of this comment is to clarify our notion of local part, which seems to have caused some confusion in the recent literature. This notion is based on Bell's and demands that local hidden variables are physical, the idea being that, if discovered, they would not contradict basic physical principles. We explain why the recent supposed "counterexamples" that have appeared are not counterexamples to our theorem--in fact they are based on a definition of local hidden variables which would allow signalling and is therefore not physical.

Linda Wessels

Jeffrey Bub, Vandana Shiva

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.

Travis Norsen

Abner Shimony

The study of hidden-variable interpretations of quantum mechanics was transformed by two papers of Bell. In his 1966 paper in Reviews of Modern Physics [1] he analysed the argument of von Neumann [2] and the more powerful arguments of Jauch and Piron [3] and of Gleason [4], all leading to similar conclusions about the nonassignability of simultaneous values to all the observables of a nontrivial quantum system; and he showed that these arguments do not exclude what may be called “contextualistic” hidden-variable theories, in which the value of an observable O is allowed to depend not only upon the hidden state λ, but also upon the set C of compatible observables measured along with O . In Bell's 1964 paper in Physics [5] (written later than the other, in spite of the earlier publication date) he gave a new kind of argument against a hidden-variable interpretation of quantum mechanics, by showing that no hidden-variables theory which satisfies a certain condition of locality can agree with all the statistical predictions of quantum mechanics. The main purpose of this lecture is to discuss an experiment, designed by Clauser, Horne, Holt and myself [6], which is based on Bell's proof of the incompatibility of quantum mechanics and local hidden-variable theories. Before doing this, however, I wish to make several comments.