What is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

by Adam Becker

Others claim that the form of realism assumed by Bell’s theorem is the very idea that anything at all exists independently of observation. Denying this, they claim, is the true insight of the Copenhagen interpretation, and this is what allows the Copenhagen interpretation to remain local despite Bell’s ingenious proof. Ignoring the problem of solipsism that this introduces into physics—whose observations make things real?—another problem arises. Without the assumption that reality exists independently of observation in some form, the idea of locality itself is meaningless. How can it mean anything to talk about effects moving faster than light from one place to another when neither the objects nor their locations exist at all? Denying realism to break Bell’s proof invariably breaks the concept of locality as well—a Pyrrhic victory for the antirealists determined to keep physics local at all costs. As Bell himself said, “I don’t know any conception of locality which works with quantum mechanics. So I think we’re stuck with nonlocality.”