Since the discovery of Bell’s theorem, the physics community has come to take seriously the possibility that the universe might contain physical processes which are spatially nonlocal, but there has been no such revolution with regard to the possibility of temporally nonlocal processes. In this article, we argue that the assumption of temporal locality is actively limiting progress in the field of quantum foundations. We investigate the origins of the assumption, arguing that it has arisen for historical and pragmatic reasons rather than good scientific ones, then explain why temporal locality is in tension with relativity and review some recent results which cast doubt on its validity.
Since the discovery of Bell’s theorem, the physics community has come to take seriously the possibility that the universe might contain physical processes which are spatially nonlocal, but there has been no such revolution with regard to the possibility of temporally nonlocal processes. In this article, we argue that the assumption of temporal locality is actively limiting progress in the field of quantum foundations. We investigate the origins of the assumption, arguing that it has arisen for historical and pragmatic reasons rather than good scientific ones, then explain why temporal locality is in tension with relativity and review some recent results which cast doubt on its validity.
Einstein held that the formalism of quantum mechanics involves “spooky actions at a distance.” In the 1960s, Bell amplified this by showing that the predictions of quantum mechanics disagree with the results of any locally causal description. It should be appreciated that accepting nonlocal descriptions while retaining causality leads to a clash with relativity. Furthermore, the causal arrow of time by definition contradicts time-reversal symmetry. For these reasons, Wheeler and Feynman, Costa de Beauregard, Cramer, Price, and others have advocated abandoning microscopic causality. In this paper, a simplistic but concrete example of this line of thought is presented, in the form of a retro-causal toy model that is stochastic and provides an appealing description of the quantum correlations discussed by Bell. It is concluded that Einstein’s “spooky actions” may occur “in the past” rather than “at a distance,” resolving the tension between quantum mechanics and relativity and opening unexplored possibilities for future reformulations of quantum mechanics.
Despite their Nobel Prize-winning empirical falsification, the interpretation of the Bell inequality remains a subject of controversy. This article discusses and attempts to clarify the reasons John S. Bell and A. Einstein claimed that quantum entanglement implies puzzling nonlocal correlations that Einstein famously termed ``spooky action at a distance.'' The issue remains notoriously controversial and has roughly divided the scientific community into localists and nonlocalists. Without taking a stance on either side in the long-standing, polarized debate, we examine Bell's actual argument, highlighting how it differs from the current orthodoxy.
Introduction Fifty years after the publication of Bell's theorem, there remains some controversy regarding what the theorem is telling us about quantum mechanics, and what the experimental violations of Bell inequalities are telling us about the world. This chapter represents my best attempt to be clear about what I think the lessons are. In brief: There is some sort of nonlocality inherent in any quantum theory, and, moreover, in any theory that reproduces, even approximately, the quantum probabilities for the outcomes of experiments. But not all forms of nonlocality are the same; there is a distinction to be made between action at a distance and other forms of nonlocality, and I will argue that the nonlocality needed to violate the Bell inequalities need not involve action at a distance. Furthermore, the distinction between forms of nonlocality makes a difference when it comes to compatibility with relativistic causal structure. The Bell locality condition is a condition which, if satisfied, renders possible a completely local account of the correlations between outcomes of spatially separated experiments. Bell's theorem tells us that the probabilities that we compute from quantum mechanics do not admit of such an account. Modulo auxiliary assumptions that, in my opinion, should be noncontroversial, this yields the conclusion that there must be something nonlocal about any theory that yields the quantum mechanical probabilities or anything close to them. One way to violate the Bell locality condition – and this is the way that any deterministic theory must do it – is via straightforward action at a distance. However, we should also consider the possibility of a stochastic theorywith probabilistic laws that involve irreducible correlations. The sort of nonlocality inherent in such a theory involves relations between events that are significantly different from causal relations as usually conceived. Perhaps surprisingly, such a theory, unlike its deterministic cousins, need not invoke a distinguished relation of distant simultaneity. This makes a difference for the situation of the two sorts of theories vis-a-vis relativity. Though a deterministic theory can achieve the appearance of being relativistic, at the level of observable phenomena, it can do so only by introducing a preferred foliation and with it a causal structure at odds with relativistic causal structures. Things are otherwise with dynamical collapse theories.
Despite their Nobel Prize-winning empirical falsification, the interpretation of Bell's inequality remains a subject of controversy. This article discusses and attempts to clarify the reasons John S. Bell and A. Einstein claimed that quantum entanglement implies puzzling nonlocal correlations that Einstein famously termed ``spooky action at a distance.'' The issue remains notoriously controversial and has roughly divided the scientific community into localists and nonlocalists. Without taking a stance on either side in the long-standing, polarized debate, we examine Bell's actual argument and highlight how his reasoning differs from the current orthodoxy.
Spooky Action at a Distance In the context of correlation experiments involving pairs of experiments performed at very nearly the same time in very far-apart experimental regions, Einstein famously said [1], But on one supposition we should in my opinion hold absolutely fast: “The real factual situation of the system S2 is independent of what is done with system S1 which is spatially separated from the former.” This demand is incompatible with the basic ideas of standard (Copenhagen/orthodox) quantum mechanics, which makes two relevant claims: (1) Experimenters in the two labs make “local free choices” that determine which experiments will be performed in their respective labs. These choices are free in the sense of not being predetermined by the prior history of the physically described aspects of the universe, and they are localized in the sense that the physical effects of these free choices are inserted into the physically described aspects of the universe only within the laboratory in which the associated experiment is being performed. (2) These choices of what is done with the system being measured in one lab can (because of a measurement-induced global collapse of the quantum state) influence the outcome of the experiment performed at very close to the same time in the very faraway lab. This influence of what is done with the system being measured in one region upon the outcome appearing at very nearly the same time in a very faraway lab was called “spooky action at a distance” by Einstein, and was rejected by him as a possible feature of “reality.” John Bell's Quasi-classical Statistical Theory Responding to the seeming existence in the quantum world of “spooky actions,” John Bell [2] proposed a possible alternative to the standard approach that might conceivably be able to reconcile quantum spookiness with “reality.” This alternative approach rests on the fact that quantum mechanics is a statistical theory.We already have in physics a statistical theory called “classical statistical mechanics.”
The notion of nonlocality implicitly implies there might be some kind of spooky action at a distance in nature, however, the validity of quantum mechanics has been well tested up to now. In this work it is argued that the notion of nonlocality is physically improper, the basic principle of locality in nature is well respected by quantum mechanics, namely, the uncertainty principle. We show that the quantum bound on the Clauser, Horne, Shimony, and Holt (CHSH) inequality can be recovered from the uncertainty relation in a multipartite setting. We further argue that the super-quantum correlation demonstrated by the nonlocal box is not physically comparable with the quantum one. The origin of the quantum structure of nature still remains to be explained, some post-quantum theory which is more complete in some sense than quantum mechanics is possible and might not necessarily be a hidden variable theory.