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Are There Quantum Effects Coming from Outside Space–Time? Nonlocality, Free Will and “No Many-Worlds”

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Abstract

Observing the violation of Bell’s inequality tells us something about all possible future theories: they must all predict nonlocal correlations. Hence Nature is nonlocal. After an elementary introduction to nonlocality and a brief review of some recent experiments, I argue that Nature’s nonlocality together with the existence of free will is incompatible with the many-worlds view of quantum physics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that one can group the λ’s into equivalence classes where two λ’s are said equivalent iff they determine precisely the same probabilities p(a, b ∣ x, y, λ); hence it suffices that one can “count” the equivalence classes.

  2. 2.

    Years ago, I once argued that the many-worlds doesn’t seem compatible with Occam’s razor principle (Gisin and Percival 1993). As answer I got the following: “Occam’s razor should not be applied to the physical world, but be applied to the Schrödinger equation; don’t add any term to this beautiful equation” (Zeh 1993). The linearity of the Schrödinger equation was assumed more real than our physical universe!

  3. 3.

    Some conclude that it must be realism that is faulty. But I don’t see in which sense this could save locality? Moreover, realism is often confused with determinism, an uninteresting terminology issue (see Gisin 2012).

  4. 4.

    Talk delivered at the first John Stewart Bell prize award ceremony (Gisin 2009b).

  5. 5.

    Many physicist hate this conclusion because they fear that it allow faster than light signaling. Hence, let me emphasize that nonlocality does not necessarily imply faster than light signaling. Actually, today’s paradigm for most specialists is nonlocality without signaling.

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Correspondence to Nicolas Gisin .

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Gisin, N. (2013). Are There Quantum Effects Coming from Outside Space–Time? Nonlocality, Free Will and “No Many-Worlds”. In: Suarez, A., Adams, P. (eds) Is Science Compatible with Free Will?. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5212-6_3

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