16 - Some Thoughts on Quantum Nonlocality and Its Apparent Incompatibility with Relativity

Summary

It may well be that a relativistic version of the theory, while Lorentz invariant and local at the observational level, may be necessarily non-local and with a preferred frame (or aether) at the fundamental level.

– John Bell [1]

Introduction

Bell's theorem establishes a contradiction between locality (and a few other assumptions) and certain predictions of quantum mechanics [2]. There have been two main issues surrounding the deep implications of this celebrated theorem. The first issue is basic, and it concerns whether the theorem really establishes that nonlocality is a necessary feature of any empirically viable theory and hence a feature of nature itself. One aspect of the issue concerns exactly what the underlying assumptions of Bell's theorem are. For example, some argue that these assumptions include the assumption of counterfactual definiteness [3–5], while others disagree [6–8]. The other aspect of the issue concerns which assumption should be dropped due to the resulting contradiction. Some believe that standard quantum mechanics may avoid nonlocality by denying counterfactual definiteness [3–5].

The second issue is much deeper, and it concerns how to make sense of the strange nonlocality when assuming that Bell's theorem establishes that our world is nonlocal. In particular, it has yet to be determined whether such quantum nonlocality is compatible with the theory of relativity, e.g., whether the nonlocality requires the existence of a preferred Lorentz frame [7, 9, 10]. It seems that “there is a preferred frame of reference, and in this preferred frame of reference things do go faster than light … Behind the apparent Lorentz invariance of the phenomena, there is a deeper level which is not Lorentz invariant” [11]. But it also seems possible that the existence of a preferred Lorentz frame is an illusion, since it cannot be detected according to standard quantum mechanics. A more subtle issue is whether quantum nonlocality permits superluminal signaling. It is widely thought that the answers to these questions will lead to a deeper understanding of Bell's theorem and quantum nonlocality.

In this paper, we will present a new analysis of quantum nonlocality and its apparent incompatibility with relativity.