Bell's theorem - for or against Hidden Variables?

[Schmelzer]

Annals of Physics' editorial board, in shamefully retracting Joy Christian's previously-published paper,  gave this excuse:  " ... we have concluded that your result is in obvious conflict with a proven scientific fact, i.e., violation of local realism that has been demonstrated not only theoretically but experimentally in recent experiments, and thus your result could not be generally accepted by the physics community."

Nice to hear. I already intended to present "Annals of Physics" on my web page as a crank journal, for publishing crank papers and the rejection to consider refutations of this crank nonsense. So, it appears unnecessary. Fine.

[Schmelzer]

I'm happy to position QM as a subdiscipline of information theory.   It fails as a foundational theory. ...
The acid test will be quantum computing.

I would like to note here that I agree with all these three statements.  I think it is worth to note this, given that we have a completely different opinion about the worth of Christian's writings.

[Thomas Ray]

Ilja,

How do you differentiate a crank from everyone else? Like John Baez, by making your own standard? Personally, I enjoy the company of Einstein and other such cranks.

Anyway, what do you find lacking in Joy Christian's measurement framework?

[gill1109]

Annals of Physics' excuse for retracting the paper is ludicrous: the paper contradicts what is currently believed in the physics community so it must be removed from the record.

Moreover they say that there is experimental support for violation of local realism. They apparently don't realise that the argument from experiment to rejection of local realism depends on Bell's theoretical analysis (or modern variants thereof), and it is Bell's analysis which Christian objects to.

A good reason for not accepting the paper in the first place would have been the huge number of mathematical errors and self-contradictions which it contains, many of them very obvious and very elementary. There is no "measurement framework" there. Just a mass of contradictions.

But the paper was accepted and was available on the journal website for some time. I think the paper should not be retracted but should be left "on record" for anyone to see.

By the way, Joy learnt about Pearle's model from an early version of my https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.04431 which I published on Rpubs in March 2014, http://rpubs.com/gill1109/Pearle. Christian's computer simulations were originally done by copy paste from my own R code. He writes "our model is not concerned about data rejection or detection loophole". Unfortunately, his own simulation code contradicts this assertion.

We can add plagiarism to his skills.

[Thomas Ray]

Don't you suppose that if the editors had identified "a huge number of mathematical errors and self-contradictions" they would have used those as reasons for rejection, instead of choosing to look stupid in front of the whole scientific universe?

[secur]

They could have figured "lesser of two evils".

They look stupid admitting the "result is in obvious conflict with a proven scientific fact". But they'd really look stupid admitting they'd accepted a paper with "a huge number of mathematical errors and self-contradictions".

Of course I don't know their thought process but this seems like a possibility.

[Thomas Ray]

So it's better to look twice as stupid than just simply stupid?

[secur]

That sounds like a trick question! I'd say the less stupid one looks the better. Note, I've got plenty of experience in this area, so my opinion carries some weight. But if Annals of Physics or anyone thinks otherwise they're welcome to look as stupid as they wish.

BTW I still don't think that "exploding ball" paper is all that bad. Although Gill1109 (born November 9th?) says there are lots of errors, I never looked into them and didn't notice any myself - except that the conclusion is wrong AFAIK.

[gill1109]

That sounds like a trick question! I'd say the less stupid one looks the better. Note, I've got plenty of experience in this area, so my opinion carries some weight. But if Annals of Physics or anyone thinks otherwise they're welcome to look as stupid as they wish.

BTW I still don't think that "exploding ball" paper is all that bad. Although Gill1109 (born November 9th?) says there are lots of errors, I never looked into them and didn't notice any myself - except that the conclusion is wrong AFAIK.

September 11, actually.

Here's an example from the Annals of Physics paper. I think this is obvious, but it seems others don't notice it.

I refer to https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.2355v4.pdf

According to (55), A(a, lambda) = +1 if lambda = +1, A(a, lambda) = -1 if lambda = -1
According to (56), B(b, lambda) = -1 if lambda = +1, B(b, lambda) = +1 if lambda = -1
We know that lambda = +/- 1

I would say that this makes A(a, lambda)B(b, lambda) = -1, always.

Hence the correlation computed in (60) - (68) must equal -1.

(You can go on to search for a mistake in (60) to (68); that's not so difficult. There are two, actually).

We already discussed this on another thread...

I think Annals of Physics chose the reason for retraction which will most easily convince most physicists, and will also most easily convince lawyers. Hence the logic of their argument is not very important.

[Thomas Ray]

Gill wrote: "I think Annals of Physics chose the reason for retraction which will most easily convince most physicists, and will also most easily convince lawyers. Hence the logic of their argument is not very important."

And that's just the size of it, isn't it?

For everyone who isn't concerned about the future of science.

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Without rehashing arguments and counterarguments, Gill is ignoring the result on parallelized S^3.  Arguing for a probabilistic result in R^3.  Complete straw man.

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That sounds like a trick question! I'd say the less stupid one looks the better. Note, I've got plenty of experience in this area, so my opinion carries some weight. But if Annals of Physics or anyone thinks otherwise they're welcome to look as stupid as they wish.

BTW I still don't think that "exploding ball" paper is all that bad. Although Gill1109 (born November 9th?) says there are lots of errors, I never looked into them and didn't notice any myself - except that the conclusion is wrong AFAIK.

Well, what do you find wrong with the conclusion (I assume you mean the paper that Gill most recently linked), specifically?