Completeness Revisited: A Temporal Resolution of the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen Argument
Daniel Baker
The Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) argument was originally posed as a challenge to the completeness of quantum mechanics, rather than its empirical adequacy. While subsequent developments—most notably Bell’s theorem and experimental tests of nonlocal correlations— have constrained classes of hidden-variable theories, they have not resolved the underlying on- tological question raised by EPR: whether the quantum state exhausts physical reality. In this paper, we revisit the EPR criterion of completeness from the perspective of a temporally grounded physical framework, the Temporal Inertia Framework (TIF). We argue that the orig- inal EPR dilemma rests on an implicit assumption that physical reality must be specified on spacelike hypersurfaces, an assumption shared by both EPR and Bohr. By relaxing this assump- tion and allowing physical correlations to arise from shared temporal structure rather than local spatial variables or superluminal influence, one may satisfy the EPR realism criterion without violating relativistic causality or Bell-type constraints. Quantum mechanics is thus interpreted as operationally complete but ontologically incomplete, with quantum indeterminacy emerging from dynamical interactions with a proposed underlying temporal structure.
•Jan 27, 2026•0 citations