One of the endearing traits of Asher Peres is that when somebody publishes something he knows to be wrong, he does not bother to refute it, even if the paper criticizes his own work. Life is too brief for such frivolity. As a small 70th birthday present I would like to answer one such recent attack. It’s not much of a present, since Asher will not read my paper. Why should he? He already knows this criticism is nonsense. But somebody has to set the written record straight for future historians, so I will do it as part of this celebration. Fortunately this particular issue is so easily settled that this can be a very short paper. Since Asher is a master of the very short paper, my Peresian brevity is an important part of my act of homage. The criticism I address can be found in a new formulation by Karl Hess and Walter Philipp(1) of their view that all versions of Bell’s theorem are fundamentally flawed. I focus here only on their criticism of the version in Asher’s book.(2)
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K. Hess W. Philipp (2004) ArticleTitle“Breakdown of Bell’s theorem for certain objective local parameter spaces” PNAS 101 1799–1805 Occurrence Handle2004PNAS..101.1799H Occurrence Handle2005a:81024
A. Peres (1993) Quantum Theory: Concepts and Methods Kluwer Academic Dordrecht 164
A. Peres (1978) ArticleTitle“Unperformed experiments have no results.” Am J Phys 46 745–747 Occurrence Handle10.1119/1.11393 Occurrence Handle1978AmJPh..46..745P
K. Hess W. Philipp (2001) ArticleTitle“A possible loophole in the theorem of Bell” PNAS 98 14224–14227 Occurrence Handle2001PNAS...9814224H Occurrence Handle2003a:81018
K. Hess W. Philipp (2001) ArticleTitle“Bell’s theorem and the problem of decidability between the views of Einstein and Bohr” PNAS 98 14228–14233 Occurrence Handle2001PNAS...9814228H Occurrence Handle2003a:81019
Bell J.S. (1981). “Bertlemann’s socks and the nature of reality,” J de Physique Colloque C2, suppl. au numero 3, 42: C2 41-61.
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This essay was completed and submitted before the sad and unexpected death of Asher Peres on January 1, 2005. I have left it in its original form because I sent Asher a preprint, and he told me that his wife Aviva had enjoyed it. I like to think that perhaps he had a quick look and enjoyed it a bit himself. Life in the field of quantum foundations will not be as much fun without his opinions, his wit, and his warmth I point out that in spite of recent claims to the contrary, the proof of Bell’s theorem in Asher Peres’s book works even in the presence of time-correlated hidden variables in the detectors.
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Mermin, N.D. What’s Wrong with this Criticism. Found Phys 35, 2073–2077 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-005-8663-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-005-8663-2