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Hidden Locality, Conspiracy and Superluminal Signals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Frederick M. Kronz
Frederick M. Kronz*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, The University of Texas at Austin
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Abstract

This paper involves one crucial assumption; namely, that the statistical predictions of quantum mechanics for Bell's variant of the EPR experiment will continue to be verified as detector efficiencies are improved and the need for coincidence counters is eliminated. This assumption entails that any hidden-variables theory for quantum mechanics must violate Bell's inequality—the inequality derived in Bell (1964). It is shown here that four locality conditions are involved in the derivation of Bell's inequality; and that a violation of any of the four locality conditions will either entail the existence of superluminal influences or the existence of superluminal signals (superluminal influences that can be used to transmit information), if conspiratorial theories can be ruled out. The attempts so far to rule out conspiratorial theories are all found to be rather dubious, but there are other considerations developed here that rule them out convincingly. Finally, it is demonstrated that violations of each of the four locality conditions can be used to transmit information superluminally, if certain auxiliary conditions are satisfied. This is of particular interest because one of these conditions corresponds to a condition dubbed “completeness” by Jon Jarrett. Jarrett and others have suggested that violations of completeness cannot be used to send information superluminally. Demonstrating otherwise is, perhaps, the most significant result obtained in this paper.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , September 1990 , pp. 420 - 444
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I am especially grateful to Abner Shimony for helpful suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. I would also like to thank Bob Causey and Bob Kane, and my students Ben Schumacher, Craig Hansen and Paul Blair for their comments and questions on the same.

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