Dice Games and Conspiracies

Abstract

Ever since Newton, two forms of influence or causation have vied for supremacy in physicist’s theories. Descartes and his followers thought local or contiguous action — material particles colliding and rebounding, for example — the essence of mechanical explanation; Newton evoked their wrath by advancing a form of action at a distance. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Maxwell and Einstein restored the local picture in their continuum theories of electromagnetism and gravity, and the cycle seemed to have come to an end — until Bell proved his theorem in 1964.