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Bell on Bell's theorem: The changing face of nonlocality

Brown, Harvey R. and Timpson, Christopher Gordon (2014) Bell on Bell's theorem: The changing face of nonlocality. [Preprint]

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Abstract

Between 1964 and 1990, the notion of nonlocality in Bell's papers underwent a profound change as his nonlocality theorem gradually became detached from quantum mechanics, and referred to wider probabilistic theories involving correlations between separated beables. The proposition that standard quantum mechanics is itself nonlocal (more precisely, that it violates `local causality') became divorced from the Bell theorem per se from 1976 on, although this important point is widely overlooked in the literature. In 1990, the year of his death, Bell would express serious misgivings about the mathematical form of the local causality condition, and leave ill-defined the issue of the consistency between special relativity and violation of the Bell-type inequality. In our view, the significance of the Bell theorem, both in its deterministic and stochastic forms, can only be fully understood by taking into account the fact that a fully Lorentz-covariant version of quantum theory, free of action-at-a-distance, can be articulated in the Everett interpretation.


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Item Type: Preprint
Creators:
CreatorsEmailORCID
Brown, Harvey R.
Timpson, Christopher Gordon
Additional Information: To appear in "50 Years of Bell's Theorem", Mary Bell and Shan Gao (ends.), CUP.
Keywords: Bell theorem, Bell-Kochen-Specker, nonlocality, Everett interpretation
Subjects: Specific Sciences > Physics > Quantum Mechanics
Depositing User: Prof Harvey R Brown
Date Deposited: 15 Jan 2015 14:06
Last Modified: 15 Jan 2015 14:06
Item ID: 11268
Subjects: Specific Sciences > Physics > Quantum Mechanics
Date: 12 December 2014
URI: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/11268

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