Abstract
In 1985, David Mermin, a solid-state physicist at Cornell, wrote a funny and informative account of the EPR argument and Bell’s theorem for Physics Today, the Wall Street Journal of the American physics community. Mermin’s article generated a resurgence of interest in the subject, which swept like a cresting wave through the cocktail-party circuit and just as quickly receded. I recall confused discussions from this period with members of my generation, who alternately declared Bell’s theorem trivial, uninteresting, or the greatest discovery since Einstein proved moving clocks go slowly. One sentiment produced universal agreement, however: do not write papers or apply for grants in the area, since “philosophical” issues are career killers.
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Notes
Mermin’s article appeared in Physics Today (April 1985), p. 38. See also the Letters column in November 1985, p. 9. Mermin is a regular contributor to Physics Today and writes frequently about quantum conundrums.
About the 70,000 journals: the number listed in Bowker-Ulrich’s database as of December 7, 1990, was 74,000; see Science on that date, p. 1331. A survey of the top 4,500 journals undertaken for Science revealed that 55 percent of scientific papers are never cited by other authors, serving only to increase the author’s “page count.”
The first and third loopholes were first described by Clauser and Home, Phys. Rev. D 10 (1974), p. 526;
see also Clauser and Shimony’s 1978 review (op. cit., Chapter 13) and T. K. Lo and A. S. Shimony, Phys. Rev. A 23, 6 (1981).
Aspect’s experiment: see A. Aspect, J. Dalibard, and G. Roger, Phys. Rev. Lett. 49 (1982), p. 1804. That such rapid switching should be incorporated in the experiment was first mentioned in print by Shimony in 1971; see Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, B. d’Espagnat, ed., who attributes the idea to Clauser. Aspect’s water baths did not entirely close the communication loophole, however, since the vibrations in the baths are periodic, and hence the vibration phases might be exploited by some hidden communication scheme. See also E. Santos, Phys. Rev. Lett. 66 11, pp. 1388–1390, and Errata 66, no. 24, pp. 3227, a comment/rejoinder 68, no. 17, pp. 2701–2703,
and related work: S. Caser, Phys. Lett. 121 (1987), p. 131.
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Wick, D. (1995). Loopholes. In: The Infamous Boundary. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4030-3_14
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