Bye Bye Bell?

Many of the spookiest aspects of Quantum Mechanics are related to the apparent instantaneous action at a distance effects that surround the so-called "paradox" of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen and Bell's Theorem, which appears to show that no theory with so-called hidden variables that are both local and realistic can satisfy the quantum mechanical principles and the experiments that have confirmed them.

Joy Christian has a new paper (quant-ph/0703179) that purports to disprove Bell's theorem. Here is the abstract:

Disproof of Bell's Theorem by Clifford Algebra Valued Local Variables
Authors: Joy Christian (Perimeter and Oxford)
Comments: 4 pages, RevTeX4

It is shown that Bell's theorem fails for the Clifford algebra valued local realistic variables. This is made evident by exactly reproducing quantum mechanical expectation value for the EPR-Bohm type spin correlations observable by means of a local, deterministic, Clifford algebra valued variable, without necessitating either remote contextuality or backward causation. Since Clifford product of multivector variables is non-commutative in general, the spin correlations derived within our locally causal model violate the CHSH inequality just as strongly as their quantum mechanical counterparts.


As I understand her argument, Bell's mistake was in treating as a vector something that really should be considered a bivector - something we do all the time in classical physics, making use of the Hodge duality, but maybe not so safely in QM. Bell, who admittedly liked hidden variables, might have been interested.

I would be interested in others opinions.

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