Talk:Bell test loopholes

The fact that the Bell tests have flaws in them, conventionally referred to as "loopholes", is often omitted entirely in popular literature. I think people have a right to know they are there, and that in fact their existence means that the statement that "the Bell test was violated" means very little. The test in question was probably not valid and alternative, "local realist" explanations for the observations could be given. Looking at the real experiments involving light, it seems clear that it is very much easier to explain them using classical notions -- assuming light is a continuous wave -- than using quantum theory with its particle-like "photons". Do have a look at my site. Caroline Thompson 22:48, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)


 * (William M. Connolley 07:55, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)) Um... if you're on a personal quest to overthrow QM, wikipedia isn't the place to do it. If you want to present some non-conformist information, thats OK by me. You should be aware of No original research - personally I think this gets over used to crush stuff, but be aware of it anyway.


 * Even though Caroline H. Thompson may not believe in all of quantum theory, she has probably published the most important discovery ever in theoretical physics.


 * In 2000, her publication that there is repulsive force with out of phase waves and no force with in phase waves may well be the simple answer that Einstein was looking for.


 * If her 2000 atatement is correct then she may well have unified ALL the forces and given us the first true Theory of Everything.


 * Do not discount Caroline.--DPFJr 17:35, 4 Jul 2004

Thanks Daniel (or may I call you Robert, or Zeus?). This is hardly relevant here though. My findings on the Bell tests are on rather more solid ground. Caroline Thompson 22:51, 4 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Bell test loopholes
I think that Caroline, as a phycisist (Cambridge, UK), should be taken seriously in her attempt to bring common sense to the EPR discussion - and Bell's result in particular - via her 'local realist' view, pointing out serious loopholes resp. mis-interpretations of experimental results. -- Nico-Benschop (NL)

Thanks Nico! You've given the game away though: the fact that I have a 'local realist' view is not supposed to be obvious! It is facts that I am presenting. Talking of facts, incidentally, I got a maths degree at Cambridge in 1965, not a physics one. Caroline Thompson 20:51, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)

This seems a bit argumentative.

Conclusion
The fair sampling loophole casts doubt on the majority of claims for experimental support for quantum entanglement. Where it does not apply, other loopholes are present. For convincing comfirmation of the phenomenon, all loopholes must be closed at once. The search for a loophole-free experiment continues...

Roadrunner 04:02, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Merge with "Loopholes in optical Bell test experiments
Roadrunner, I agree the two pages should be merged but, not to put too fine a point on it, you've made a complete hash of the job! How can I now get back to Loopholes in optical Bell test experiments so as to start again? The references are now all over the place. There is repetition here and there. Some sentences don't make sense any longer, there are now two introductory sections ... It's hopeless! You should have left it to me! Caroline Thompson 21:16, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Please justify statement that Thompson is a quack!
Whoever is addding this to pages on the Bell tests is kindly requested to explain what he/she means. If anyone thinks I am a "quack" simply because I challenge the majority opinion, I recommend reading Ian Stewart's article in New Scientist, 25 Sept 2004, pp28-33. On page 33 he discusses the loopholes in the Bell tests (though probably not the same ones I do -- I shall try and get hold of Tim Palmer's paper and check). He writes that if local hidden variable theories can, after all, be found, they will "put quantum theory back among all the other statistical theories of science: random from some points of view, determinstic from others." As he says, "Bell's work, though brilliant, is not as conclusive as [most physicists] imagine." Caroline Thompson 18:12, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Loopholes?
It's probably OK if someone has a private page on Wikipedia with these weird speculations. Those who get at this page should still have the opportunity to learn the truth, not just the speculations. The reality is that given those well described assumptions - that the world behaves locally and according to some "classical" intution, Bell's theorem is simply a valid mathematical theorem. Also, it is today absolutely well established that Bell's inequalities are violated in the real world - there are many experiments that show it absolutely clearly. Quantum mechanics, with whatever meaningful interpretation (but let me talk about Copenhagen or Consistent Histories or Many-worlds interpretation) always predicted that Bell's inequalities were violated. In different interpretations, the precise loophole why they can be violated is different. The conventional interpretations question the "realism" assumption - the wave function is not reality, but just a tool to calculate probabilities. Some other, more speculative interpretations - such as Bohmian interpretation - prefer to keep reality, but they add a new "unnecessary superstructure", as Einstein called it, to explain the same results of experiments by explicitly nonlocal action at a distance. All meaningful interpretations eventually agree about the result of the experiment, and all of them accept that at least one assumption of Bell's theorem had to be incorrect. Smart physicists such as Bohr, Dirac, Heisenberg, Born, Pauli, and others have known the correct results of all these experiments decades before they were actually made. There was nothing surprising about them - quantum mechanics has given unambiguous predictions about all of them as soon as it was first created in the late 1920s. OK, maintain this webpage if you want to look for loopholes, but it deserves a POV. --Lumidek 16:25, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * I think the self-promotion is inappropriate, as is the blatant bias in POV. However, this is the only page where Caroline Thompson's view half makes sense.  So I recommend allowing some flexibility here as long as the overall effect is within reason.  I plan to come back here later.--DrChinese 22:20, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Criticism is good, it moves science forward.
It is good there are people critical of accepted truths in science, we must never forget that not being willing to accept the truths handed down to us authorities is the basis for all progress. Yet being critical because you do not like something in face of evidence is not progressive. The logic goes like this: if A is true, then B is true, but we don't like B, therefore A is false. This is not a good way to do science.

Caroline Thompson denies two of the most fundamental discoveries of physics, both Quantum Mechanics rejection of local realism and relativity theory's rejection of the all pervasive aether. Both these experimentally supported ideas strongly change humanity's perception of the world, and therefore is hard to swallow I agree. When Caroline Thompson, however, seems to be on a quest to change both these accepted perceptions of the world I suspect it is because she wants science to conform with her idea of how the world should be. I believe it is criticism for it's own sake, instead of constructive criticism.

Where is info on Bell's inequalities?
The present Bell's theorem page quotes only one Bell inequality. More are needed to make sense of the loopholes. The re-direct of the link to the Bell inequalities page is therefore inappropriate. Caroline Thompson 18:29, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

VfD result
This page was voted on for deletion at Votes for deletion/Bell test loopholes. The final result was Merge and redirect to Bell test experiments. --Deathphoenix 02:08, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)