The No-Signalling Theorems: A Nitpicking Distinction
نویسنده
چکیده
Shortly before his untimely death, John Stewart Bell remarked that his famous theorem tells us “that maybe there must be something happening faster than light, although it pains me even to say that much” [emphasis added] [14, p. 90]. Bell’s reaction to his own momentous discovery is puzzling: why should it have pained him or anyone else? Should we not be excited and fascinated by the possibility of superluminality, and want to learn as much about it as possible—instead of trying to deny its reality or minimize its importance? I’ll return to this question later in this paper; first, I want to critically review the orthodox argument for what Abner Shimony has called “peaceful coexistence” between quantum mechanics and relativity [23]. The term peaceful coexistence was used by Shimony ironically2 and was meant to suggest that while quantum mechanics apparently subscribes to a nonlocal ideology, it does not threaten the standard interpretation of special relativity because quantum mechanics does not permit the exploitation of nonlocality for controllable faster-than-light signalling. Thus, according to this doctrine, a compromise is possible which (like some kind of analgesic) masks the metaphysical pain occasioned in many physicists by nonlocality, even if it does not correct the underlying pathology. There are numerous no-signalling proofs in the literature. Recently, an especially clear review of the problem has been given by Clare Hewitt-Horsmann, who claims that nosignalling (which she calls “statistical locality”) relies on “only one prior assumption” namely that the probability distribution is given by Born’s Rule,
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تاریخ انتشار 2009