Disentangling the Quantum World
1
Trinity College, Cambridge CB2 1TQ, UK
2
San José State University, San José, CA 95192-0106, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
†
These authors contributed equally to this work.
Academic Editors: Gregg Jaeger and Andrei Khrennikov
Entropy 2015, 17(11), 7752-7767; https://doi.org/10.3390/e17117752
Received: 22 September 2015
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Revised: 2 November 2015
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Accepted: 6 November 2015
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Published: 16 November 2015
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Quantum Information and Communication: From Foundations to Applications)
Correlations related to quantum entanglement have convinced many physicists that there must be some at-a-distance connection between separated events, at the quantum level. In the late 1940s, however, O. Costa de Beauregard proposed that such correlations can be explained without action at a distance, so long as the influence takes a zigzag path, via the intersecting past lightcones of the events in question. Costa de Beauregard’s proposal is related to what has come to be called the retrocausal loophole in Bell’s Theorem, but—like that loophole—it receives little attention, and remains poorly understood. Here we propose a new way to explain and motivate the idea. We exploit some simple symmetries to show how Costa de Beauregard’s zigzag needs to work, to explain the correlations at the core of Bell’s Theorem. As a bonus, the explanation shows how entanglement might be a much simpler matter than the orthodox view assumes—not a puzzling feature of quantum reality itself, but an entirely unpuzzling feature of our knowledge of reality, once zigzags are in play.
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Keywords:
entanglement; retrocausality; hidden variable
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MDPI and ACS Style
Price, H.; Wharton, K. Disentangling the Quantum World. Entropy 2015, 17, 7752-7767. https://doi.org/10.3390/e17117752
AMA Style
Price H, Wharton K. Disentangling the Quantum World. Entropy. 2015; 17(11):7752-7767. https://doi.org/10.3390/e17117752
Chicago/Turabian StylePrice, Huw, and Ken Wharton. 2015. "Disentangling the Quantum World" Entropy 17, no. 11: 7752-7767. https://doi.org/10.3390/e17117752
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