Six Impossible Things: The Mystery of the Quantum World

by John Gribbin

But by the early 1980s, experiments had been carried out (using photons, rather than electrons) that proved that Bell’s Inequality is violated. Many more such experiments, with increasing technical sophistication, have confirmed this since. Local reality is not a valid description of the world; in John Bell’s own words, spoken at a meeting in Geneva in 1990, “I don’t know of any conception of locality which works with quantum mechanics. So I think we’re stuck with non-locality.” Einstein may have felt that “no reasonable definition of reality” could allow this, but the conclusion must be that reality is, in his terms, unreasonable. But the most impressive feature of all this is often overlooked. Although the jumping-off point for Bell’s Theorem was an attempt to understand quantum physics, and those words were spoken at a quantum physics meeting, these results do not apply only to quantum physics. They apply to the world—the Universe. Whether or not you think that quantum physics might one day be replaced as a description of how the world works, this will not change things. The experiments show that local reality does not apply to the Universe.