Abstract
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, some American physicists came under the spotlight of the reactionary Senator McCarthy and became targets of his attacks, similar in some ways to those of the medieval Grand Inquisitors. The modern heresy was communism, and those who leaned towards liberal and leftist ideas were suspected of anti-American activities. Even Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the American atomic bomb, who had made a significant contribution to his country’s becoming a world power, was persecuted by McCarthy and his followers.
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Notes
- 1.
That is exactly what characterizes entanglement, and what constitutes the difference with classical physics. There, the state spaces of many-body systems could always be separated into the subspaces of the individual particles. This is what is no longer possible in the quantum world.
- 2.
D. Bohm, Y. Aharonov, Discussion of Experimental Proof for the Paradox of Einstein, Rosen, and Podolsky, Physical Review, 108, 1070 (1957).
- 3.
According to this principle, between two competing theories which both describe observations equally well, one should choose the one that is simpler or comes with fewer assumptions.
- 4.
J. Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, Cambridge (1987), S. 191.
- 5.
In 1935, the mathematician (and student of Emmy Noether) Grete Hermann had already recognized the problems in von Neumann’s argumentation. However, her work was only rediscovered in 1974.
- 6.
Bell’s inequality only applies to local hidden variables. Nonlocal hidden variables are still possible if the inequality does not hold. The best known theory with non-local variables is the aforementioned de Broglie–Bohm theory.
- 7.
More specifically, Bell’s inequality relates only to local hidden variables. Non-local hidden variables are still possible with the inequality being violated. The best known theory with non-local variables is the aforementioned de Broglie–Bohm theory.
- 8.
For example, in 1972 an experiment with entangled photons by Stuart Freedman and John Clauser showed a violation of an inequality that was very similar to Bell’s inequality, but still contained some loopholes for a local quantum theory with hidden variables. Nevertheless, this so-called CHSH (Clauser–Horn–Shimony–Holt) inference provided some first experimental evidence for the non-locality of the quantum world.
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Jaeger, L. (2018). The Experimental Resolution of the Bohr–Einstein Debate: How Entangled Particles Made Their Way from Theory into Practice. In: The Second Quantum Revolution. Copernicus, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98824-5_24
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