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Local Acausality

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Abstract

A fair amount of recent scholarship has been concerned with correcting a supposedly wrong, but wide-spread, assessment of the consequences of the empirical falsification of Bell-type inequalities. In particular, it has been claimed that Bell-type inequalities follow from “locality tout court” without additional assumptions such as “realism” or “hidden variables”. However, this line of reasoning conflates restrictions on the spatio-temporal relation between causes and their effects (“locality”) and the assumption of a cause for every event (“causality”). It thus fails to recognize a substantial restriction of the class of theories that is falsified through Bell-type inequalities.

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Notes

  1. Henceforth, I subsume also the similar constraints under the term “Bell’s Inequality”.

  2. Other current names are “factorizability” [16] for “local causality”, “completeness” and “locality” [26], or “causality” and “hidden locality” [40] for “outcome independence” and “parameter independence”.

  3. For an illuminating discussion and a proposal of how to untangle the argument, see [17, Chap. 3].

  4. Wüthrich [41] makes a similar point, but relies on the particular derivation of Bell’s Inequality by Graßhoff et al. [23].

  5. Bell [7, p. 149] and cf. Goldstein [22, Sect. 2]. Bell also gave another summary of the EPR argument, which, however, is unnecessarily long for the present purposes [5, pp. 14–15].

  6. The complete passage reads: “The EPRB correlations are such that the result of the experiment on one side immediately foretells that on the other, whenever the analyzers happen to be parallel. If we do not accept the intervention on one side as a causal influence on the other, we seem obliged to admit that the results on both sides are determined in advance anyway, independently of the intervention on the other side, by signals from the source and by the local magnet setting.” [7, p. 149]

  7. See, e.g., [23, 38, 40]. As Bell rightly emphasizes, determinism is not an assumption of the derivation of Bell’s inequality [7, p. 143]. It follows from the other assumptions in case of perfect correlations.

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Acknowledgments

Research for this article was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Project No. 105211-129730). The project was hosted by the University of Bern’s Institute for Philosophy. I thank the principal investigator Gerd Graßhoff as well as Matthias Egg, Paul Näger, Samuel Portmann, Tilman Sauer, Andreas Verdun, Christian Wüthrich, and anonymous referees for detailed comments on the manuscript or other much valuable feedback.

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  1. Institut für Philosophie, Literatur-, Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte, Technische Universität Berlin, Straße des 17. Juni 135, D-10623 , Berlin, Germany

    Adrian Wüthrich

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Wüthrich, A. Local Acausality. Found Phys 44, 594–609 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-014-9796-y

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