What is it about?
Einstein called Instantaneous influences at a distance, influences faster than the speed of light, "spooky ". A large number of physicists believe, nevertheless, that entanglement of certain particle pairs involves such spooky influences. Their believe and convictions are based on Bell-type inequalities and experiments by Aspect, Zeilinger and many others that seem to contradict these inequalities. We show that no valid connection of the inequalities to the experiments can be established, because Bell's theory is incomplete and questionable and does not follow from Einstein's physics.
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Why is it important?
Instantaneous influences at a distance are seen by many as a hallmark of entanglement, quantum computing and quantum cryptography. We have shown in the 10 papers of the special issue (that soon will be all posted) that the "proofs" of the spooky influences that are given in the literature are incorrect, because Bell's inequalities cannot be linked in any direct and valid way to the experiments. In contrast to many claims, there are also many open loopholes in the connection of Bell's argument and the experimental tests.
Perspectives
Science writers find spooky influences very romantic and often write about experiments that seem to prove them. They do this not only in Scientific American but also in the New York Times and the Spiegel as well as many other important news papers and journals. In contrast, the many deficiencies and even gross mistakes in the work of Bell and his followers are barely ever mentioned. Bell's theory is simply incomplete, because it is based on random variables and cannot include the physical time correctly (which is not a random variable). The burden of proof is, therefore, placed on experimenters who try to close the ever new loopholes that are popping up in the literature. This is an unjust burden and leads physics in the wrong direction. Murray Gell-Mann called the spooky influences "flapdoodle" (in his book The Quark and the Jaguar) and, I believe we have shown that they are flapdoodle indeed.
Karl Hess
University of Illinois System
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Special Issue: Ever New "Loopholes" in Bell’s Argument and Experimental Tests, Open Physics, September 2017, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/phys-2017-0067.
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