Tim Maudlin

Submitted to “Quantum Nonlocality and Reality – 50 Years of Bell’s theorem”

John Bell’s most celebrated contribution to the foundations of physics is his famous theorem. The theorem demonstrates that any physical theory capable of generating the predictions of the standard quantum-mechanical algorithm, in particular the prediction of violations of Bell’s inequality for experiments done at space-like separation, cannot be local. The sense of “locality” used here is the same sense that Einstein had in mind when he pointed out that the standard interpretation of the quantum algorithm was committed to “spooky action at a distance”. To this day, the import of Bell’s theorem is not universally appreciated. I have written about this elsewhere (Maudlin, 2014), and others in this volume will take up that task. It is properly the main focus during this 50^th anniversary of that great achievement. Full text