Silberstein, Michael and Stuckey, W. M. and McDevitt, Timothy
(2022)
For Whom the Bell Inequality Really Tolls.
[Preprint]
Abstract
There is a great deal of argument over the years about what exactly Bell’s theorem entails or forces us to give up, such as “locality”, “local hidden variables”, “local realism”, etc., etc. There are many ways to characterize the assumptions of Bell’s theorem and each carries serious implications for its violation, e.g., superluminal causal influences with preferred reference frames, retrocausality, superdeterminism, etc. The game in discussions of Bell’s theorem is usually to argue for giving up some assumption in the proof in order to save something else such as locality. However, 58 years after Bell’s publication there is still widespread disagreement on what exactly Bell’s theorem entails and on what causal mechanisms or dynamical model might be responsible for the experimental violations of the inequality. One reason for the lack of consensus is that all extant causal and dynamical accounts of the experimental violations of Bell's inequality are fraught with vagueness and potentially deal-breaking consequences. Given the state of play, we suggest that it's time to consider an explanation in spacetime for the experimental violation of Bell's inequality that is fully and completely acausal and adynamical. We will argue that what is happening in quantum mechanics is much like the early history of attempts to make Maxwell’s equations consistent with Galilean velocity transformation. Just as with special relativity, we will claim that what is needed is a “principle” as opposed to “constructive”' account of such violations and quantum entanglement. We will provide such an adynamical and acausal explanation herein. The primary implication is that contrary to popular belief, Bell's theorem does not entail that one must give up locality, local realism, or measurement independence in any form. Indeed, neither Bell's theorem nor experimental violations of its inequality requires any formal modification of quantum mechanics or the addition of any hidden new mechanisms or dynamics.
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