Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- A MEASUREMENT IN QUANTUM MECHANICS
- B QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT AND NONLOCALITY
- 7 Experimental test of local hidden-variable theories
- 8 An exposition of Bell's theorem
- 9 Contextual hidden variables theories and Bell's Inequalities
- 10 Controllable and uncontrollable non-locality
- 11 Events and processes in the quantum world
- 12 An exchange on local beables
- 13 Physical and philosophical issues in the Bohr–Einstein debate
- C COMPLEX SYSTEMS
- D TIME
- E THE MENTAL AND THE PHYSICAL
- Index
8 - An exposition of Bell's theorem
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- A MEASUREMENT IN QUANTUM MECHANICS
- B QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT AND NONLOCALITY
- 7 Experimental test of local hidden-variable theories
- 8 An exposition of Bell's theorem
- 9 Contextual hidden variables theories and Bell's Inequalities
- 10 Controllable and uncontrollable non-locality
- 11 Events and processes in the quantum world
- 12 An exchange on local beables
- 13 Physical and philosophical issues in the Bohr–Einstein debate
- C COMPLEX SYSTEMS
- D TIME
- E THE MENTAL AND THE PHYSICAL
- Index
Summary
The purpose of this lecture is to give a self-contained demonstration of a version of Bell's theorem and a discussion of the significance of the theorem and the experiments which it inspired. The lecture should be comprehensible to people who have had no previous acquaintance with the literature on Bell's theorem, but I hope that explicitness about premisses and consequences will make it useful even to those who are familiar with the literature.
All versions of Bell's theorem are variations, and usually generalizations, of the pioneering paper of J. S. Bell of 1964, entitled “On the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen Paradox.” All of them consider an ensemble of pairs of particles prepared in a uniform manner, so that statistical correlations may be expected between outcomes of tests performed on the particles of each pair. If each pair in the ensemble is characterized by the same quantum state φ, then the quantum mechanical predictions for correlations of the outcomes can in principle be calculated when the tests are specified. On the other hand, if it is assumed that the statistical behavior of the pairs is governed by a theory which satisfies certain independence conditions (always similar to the Parameter and Outcome Independence conditions stated below, though the exact details vary from version to version of Bell's theorem), then it is possible to derive a restriction upon the statistical correlations of the outcomes of tests upon the two particles.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Search for a Naturalistic World View , pp. 90 - 103Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993