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American Journal of Physics

Quantum mysteries revisited again

P. K. Aravind

Published Sep 13, 2004• 50 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This paper describes a device, consisting of a central source and two widely separated detectors with six switch settings each, that provides a simple gedanken demonstration of the nonclassical correlations that are the subject of Bell’s theorem without relying on either statistical effects or the occurrence of rare events. The mechanism underlying the operation of the device is revealed for readers with a knowledge of quantum mechanics.

DOI
10.1119/1.1773173

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arXiv:quant-ph/0502175•Feb 28, 2005•1 citation
This paper describes a device, consisting of a central source and two widely separated detectors with six switch settings each, that provides a simple gedanken demonstration of the nonclassical correlations that are the subject of Bell’s theorem without relying on either statistical effects or the occurrence of rare events. The mechanism underlying the operation of the device is revealed for readers with a knowledge of quantum mechanics.
A few years ago I described a simple device that reveals in a very elementary way the extremely perplexing character the data from the Bohm–Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen experiment assumes in the light of the analysis of J. S. Bell. There is a second, closely related form of that gedanken demonstration, which I would like to examine for several reasons. It is simpler: there are only two (not three) settings for each switch. The gedanken data resemble more closely the data collected in actual realizations of the device. None of the possible switch settings produce the perfect correlations found in the first version of the gedanken demonstration, where the lights always flash the same color when the switches have the same setting. Since absolutely perfect correlations are never found in the imperfect experiments we contend with in the real world, an argument that eliminates this feature of the ideal gedanken data can be applied to real data from real experiments. (If you believe, however, along with virtually all physicists, that the quantum theory gives the correct ideal limiting description of all phenomena to which it can be applied, then this is not so important a consideration.) Because the ideal perfect correlations are absent from this version of the gedanken demonstration, one is no longer impelled to assert the existence of impossible instruction sets. To establish that the new data nevertheless remain peculiar, it is necessary to take a different line of attack, which has again intriguing philosophical implications, but of a rather different character. The modified demonstration In the modified gedanken demonstration there are only two switch settings (1 and 2) at each detector.