EPR and Bell's theorem: A critical review

Dipankar Home, F. Selleri

Philippe H. Eberhard, Philippe Rosselet

B. Schulz

This article contains a review of Nelson's analysis of Bell's theorem. It shows that Bell's inequalities can be violated with a theory of local random variables if one accepts that the outcomes of these variables are not predetermined prior to measurement. The article describes the relation between Bell's theorem and the Strong Free Will theorem of Conway and Kochen. Then, the original articles of Bell are analyzed in detail. Following an article of Faris, it is explained that Bell's work on the hidden variable question in fact describes two separate theorems. Bell's first theorem says that there can be no model for the singlet state where an outcome does not depend locally on the settings of the detector where the outcome was measured. Bell's second theorem shows that Bell's inequalities can be violated by a theory that is either not deterministic, or violates causality in the sense of relativity or the free will assumption of the experimenters. It is shown in detail where Bell implicitly makes the various locality assumptions that Nelson has shown to be necessary for deriving Bell's inequality. The article closes by relating the various assumptions needed to derive Bell's theorem with the reality criterion of EPR

Jean-Louis Basdevant, Jean Dalibard

K. Hess

This review is related to the Einstein-Bohr debate and to Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen’s (EPR) and Bohm’s (EPRB) Gedanken-experiments as well as their realization in actual experiments. I examine a significant number of papers, from my minority point of view and conclude that the well-known theorems of Bell and Clauser, Horne, Shimony and Holt (CHSH) deal with mathematical abstractions that have only a tenuous relation to quantum theory and the actual EPRB experiments. It is also shown that, therefore, Bell-CHSH cannot be used to assess the nature of quantum entanglement, nor can physical features of entanglement be used to prove Bell-CHSH. Their proofs are, among other factors, based on a statistical sampling argument that is invalid for general physical entities and processes and only applicable for finite “populations”; not for elements of physical reality that are linked, for example, to a time-like continuum. Bell-CHSH have, furthermore, neglected the subtleties of the theorem of Vorob’ev that includes their theorems as special cases. Vorob’ev found that certain combinatorial-topological cyclicities of classical random variables form a necessary and sufficient condition for the constraints that are now known as Bell-CHSH inequalities. These constraints, however, must not be linked to the observables of quantum theory nor to the actual EPRB experiments for a variety of reasons, including the existence of continuum-related variables and appropriate considerations of symmetry.