Why John Stewart Bell has been haunting quantum mechanics for decades

Some people think he’s a Poltergeist on their ceilings, some say they see ghosts on dark nights – I have John Stewart Bell. The physicist’s research and enormous heritage has been disturbing me for years.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Have you ever thought that what we really experience is actually objectively, clearly real? I could not write or write about the nature of the space and time and the complex trends in the quantum world. Bell liked to think about these things, and his work changed forever that we understood them.

He was born in Belfast in 1928 and was an extremely curious and bright child with all accounts. At the age of 16, his first concert landed as a laboratory technician and locked it early. He was trained in both theoretical and experimental physics and built most of his career in the world of particle accelerators, where he worked on so much complex calculations that he now deactivated them to super computers. However, what kept Bell really alive at night was the cracks that he could see on the foundations of quantum theory.

Today, this is a settled field of physics and has been included in most pages of practitioners. New scientist – Contemporary physics, physics, mathematics and philosophy are not hostile to those who ask questions. However, when Bell appeared as a researcher, physicists still seized by people like Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein – the first major wave of the Quantum Theory – the debates, or they either settled them or the rest of them were a matter of philosophy rather than physics.

So, Bell worked almost as a hobby. This changed in 1963 when his wife, who was also a successful physicist, took a sabbatical from accelerating work and used Bell to separate his hobby into a pair of seminal articles. Although it has been taken without fanfare and has been largely ignored for years, their importance cannot be exaggerated.

Bell took a line of this philosophical questioning and turned it into something that can be investigated in a laboratory. In quantum mechanics, it is focused on the idea of ​​“hidden variables ..

As developed by Bohr and his colleagues in the 1920s and 30s, Quantum Mechanics is not a definite or friend for determinism. In a bad way, you can say very little about the quantum object until you interact with it. You can imagine which features it may have on measurement, but only probably. For example, you may know that an electron has the chance to have a certain amount of energy when you measure 98 percent and the chance to have another energy, but which one is completely random.

How does nature decide that it will serve you randomly? An explanation is that there is no random in the game, but some features – some variables – hidden from researchers. If he could determine what these hidden variables were, physicists could bring absolute predictability to quantum theory.

Bell has designed a test that will eliminate the field of huge secret variable theories from competition to change or at least change the quantum theory. This test typically requires two experiments named Alice and Bob. The circulating particle pairs are produced over and over again, then a particle is sent to Alice on each pair, while in a laboratory, the common particle goes to Bob. After receiving their particles, Alice and BOB independently choose to measure a particular feature. For example, Alice can measure the rotation of the particle.

At the same time, Bob also makes measurements and chooses how to do them, but Alice and Bob do not communicate during the experiment. In the end, they are attached to an equation Bell’s relevant data obtained in 1964. This “inequality” equation tests the data for the correlations between the measurements of Alice and BOB. Even if there is no quantum effects, some correlations may occur by chance. However, Bell has determined a level of correlation that shows that something else continued: the particles are only related to existing quantum physics and cannot exist if there are local hidden variables.

In this way, Bell’s test makes more than identifying the quantum theory as a better explanation of our reality than this deterministic, hidden variable theories-it also resets the strange feature of the “non-locality asın as a strange feature of our reality. Non -localism means that quantum objects can maintain a connection and remain inseparable, regardless of how far their behavior is. Einstein was a great critic for this, in part, he complained to the instant communication between objects that were strictly forbidden by the theory of private relativity.

Bell was an acolyte of Einstein, but the whims of physical reality ultimately prove him that his idol was wrong. His test pointed out a sound finger that researchers are still wrestling today, especially when there is a seemingly irreversible gap between the quantum theory and the best gravity developed by Einstein.

I couldn’t talk about Bell’s test on experimental practices, and it has been proven to have been technologically difficult for a long time. While this first experiment was completed in 1972, until 2015, he received the last nail for a test-free test to put the last nail in the coffin of local secret variable theories. In 2022, physicists Alain Ora, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their decades of work on these experiments.

So why do I still see John Stewart Bell where I return? Have I been exposed to some quantum curse?

The brief answer is that his work and all the experiments that tested it give almost many questions about the nature of physical reality, as they begin to respond. For example, although many physicists agree that our worlds are simply local, some are still trying to fully understand which physical mechanism is out of locality. Others are trying to develop new hidden variable theories that cannot be styled by Bell’s test. Nevertheless, others carefully solve all the mathematical assumptions of Bell in his newspapers since the 1960s. They all seem to believe that finding a new angle in Bell’s work, or some complexities that are ignored in it can be a skeleton key to push the interpretations of quantum theory beyond its current situation, and perhaps even to create a difficult theory of everything.

The fluctuation effects from Bell’s work are everywhere in quantum physics. In fact, in the last 50 years, we have been trying to do bell tests and wandering around the particles. But it’s just the beginning. A few weeks ago, I spent a lot of time with physicists who have found a way to use a way to design quantum tests, as Bell’s free will is partial, that is, in some cases of our election freedom can not be restricted in cosmically in some cases. Then, I probably entered the phone with a different team of researchers to discuss the nature of gravity and space and time, but I still talked about Bell. These physicists were inspired by their approach, and they wanted to design a similar test for the gravitational characteristics of reality rather than quantum.

I think this is part of which I can’t escape from Bell – the ability to transform philosophical issues into concrete reality tests reflects the attraction of physics. The promise of physics is that it can help us disintegrate in the world’s most confusing mysteries through experiments, and Bell’s test is an incredibly elegant arrangement of this promise.

If I had to be haunted by something, I didn’t honestly ask for a better ghost.