Often these results are trotted out to knock down any attempt to claim that there is a mechanism at work that determines when my pot of uranium spits out an alpha particle. But really these results should be interpreted only as the conditions that a hidden machine must satisfy. There could be a hidden mechanism – it’s just going to be very weird. As Bell, who was responsible for proving that such hidden machines must span the universe, said: ‘What is proved by impossibility proofs is a lack of imagination.’
