Locality and nonlocality

Date: Thu, 28 Sep 1995 11:02:25 -0700
From: qix@desire.apana.org.au
Reply to: quantum-d@teleport.com
To: quantum-d@teleport.com
Subject: QUANTUM-D: locality and nonlocality

A remark from Gerard 't Hooft, which can be found in _Physics and our
view of the world_, ed. Jan Hilgevoord (Cambridge U.P., 1994), p28:

In my opinion (but I stress that this is a minority view), there
may nevertheless be a compromise [between locality and Bell's
theorem]. This is that there is no direct action at a distance,
but there is some sort of "conspiracy". With this I mean that the
"state" of Nature that we now call "vacuum" is actually a very
complicated dynamical solution of the equations of motion,
showing correlations over space-like distances. Einstein, Rosen,
Podolsky and Bell never took such correlations completely
into account. With correlations we can have apparently impossible
"coincidences" spreading faster than the speed of light, but which
are not in conflict with the requirement of special relativity
that information cannot spread faster than the speed of light.

-mitch
http://desire.apana.org.au/~qix

PS Using the framework of Bohmian field theory (ie, Bohmian
mechanics for fields), Peter Holland made a massless nonlocal field
behave like a massive local one, by suitable choice of the
guiding wavefunctional. This is described right near the end
of his book _The Quantum Theory of Motion_.