Talk:Bell test loopholes

message: 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)
thread_title:  Bell test loopholes 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Conclusion 

message: 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)
thread_title: Merge with "Loopholes in optical Bell test experiments

message: 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)
thread_title: Please justify statement that Thompson is a quack!

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Loopholes? 

message: 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)
thread_title: Where is info on Bell's inequalities?

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