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Journal of Physics A Mathematical and General

Two noncolourable configurations in four dimensions illustrating the Kochen-Specker theorem

P. K. Aravind, Forest Lee-Elkin

Published Dec 11, 1998• 23 citations
Publisher

Abstract

It is demonstrated that the 60 rays corresponding to antipodal pairs of vertices of the 600-cell, and the 300 rays corresponding to antipodal pairs of vertices of the 120-cell, can both be used to give noncolouring proofs of the Bell-Kochen-Specker theorem in four dimensions.
DOI
10.1088/0305-4470/31/49/007

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Abstract Coxeter pointed out that a number of polytopes can be projected orthogonally into two dimensions in such a way that their vertices lie on a number of concentric regular triacontagons (or 30-gons). Among them are the 600-cell and 120-cell in four dimensions and Gosset’s polytope 4 21 in eight dimensions. We show how these projections can be modified into Kochen–Specker diagrams from which parity proofs of the Bell–Kochen–Specker theorem are easily extracted. Our construction trivially yields parity proofs of fifteen bases for all three polytopes and also allows many other proofs of the same type to be constructed for two of them. The defining feature of these proofs is that they have a fifteen-fold symmetry about the center of the Kochen–Specker diagram and thus involve both rays and bases that are multiples of fifteen. Any proof of this type can be written as a word made up of an odd number of distinct letters, each representing an orbit of fifteen bases. Knowing the word representing a proof makes it possible to infer all its characteristics without first having to recover its bases. A comparison is made with earlier approaches that have been used to obtain parity proofs in these polytopes, and some directions in which this work can be extended are discussed.