Why no Nobel Prize for Experimental work on Bell's theorem?

[Joy Christian]

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When I was a Ph.D. student in the second half of the 1980s under Abner Shimony in Boston, there was much anticipation every year of an impending Nobel Prize for John Clauser and Alain Aspect for their groundbreaking experimental work on Bell's theorem and discovering that the world we live in is fundamentally nonlocal.

Well, it has been forty years since the experimental work by John Clauser and Alain Aspect but no Nobel Prize for them so far or anyone else for their work on Bell's theorem. Why?

I think the Nobel Committee is quite sensible to completely ignore all the hype about Bell’s theorem and quantum information theory. They must know that much of that hype has no scientific basis but is based on a sociologically and politically sustained belief system, forcefully imposed on the physics community by only a handful of fanatic Bell-believers.
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[Heinera]

The committee has always emphasized "new physics". While philosophically interesting, Bell's theorem has few practical consequences. It merely derives bounds on the possible predictions of old physics (i.e. classical). And the Aspect experiment was just one more experiment confirming the predictions of quantum mechanics. They basically stopped awarding the Nobel for that a long time ago.

[Joy Christian]

The committee has always emphasized "new physics". While philosophically interesting, Bell's theorem has few practical consequences. It merely derives bounds on the possible predictions of old physics (i.e. classical). And the Aspect experiment was just one more experiment confirming the predictions of quantum mechanics. They basically stopped awarding the Nobel for that a long time ago.

What nonsense! The claim of a discovery of a radical new nonlocality in Nature is as dramatic as discovering a new fundamentally mystical voodoo in Nature. That would be the ultimate undoing of what Einstein stood for with his special and general theories of relativity. Surely, the Nobel committee would recognize that, if true. But they are not stupid to award a Nobel Prize for pure nonsense like that.
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[Heinera]

What nonsense! The claim of a discovery of a radical new nonlocality in Nature is as dramatic as discovering a new fundamentally mystical voodoo in Nature.
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The "radical new nonlocality in Nature" was already discovered in the twenties, with the formulation of Quantum Mechanics. Lots of Nobel prizes given for that.

I can assure you that the Nobel Committee does not doubt the correctness of Bell's theorem.

[Joy Christian]

What nonsense! The claim of a discovery of a radical new nonlocality in Nature is as dramatic as discovering a new fundamentally mystical voodoo in Nature.
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The "radical new nonlocality in Nature" was already discovered in the twenties, with the formulation of Quantum Mechanics. Lots of Nobel prizes given for that.

Not a single Nobel Prize mentions anything about nonlocality. Not a single one. I challenge you to find a mention of nonlocality in any of the declarations of the Nobel Prizes.
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[Joy Christian]

What nonsense! The claim of a discovery of a radical new nonlocality in Nature is as dramatic as discovering a new fundamentally mystical voodoo in Nature.
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The "radical new nonlocality in Nature" was already discovered in the twenties, with the formulation of Quantum Mechanics. Lots of Nobel prizes given for that.

I can assure you that the Nobel Committee does not doubt the correctness of Bell's theorem.

There is no such thing as Bell's "theorem." It is just a name of a silly belief system. And therefore the issue of its "correctness" cannot possibly be of any interest to the Noble Committee.
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[Heinera]

Bell did not "discover" that nature is non-local. He demonstrated that any classical theory must be non-local if it has any ambition of reproducing the predictions of QM. That is why his paper initially had a rather lukewarm reception by his contemporary physicists; they were like "So what? Nobody belives in classical theories anyways these days, except as a useful macroscopic approximation." For instance Feynman hardly ever mentioned Bell's theorem, he felt that the theorem's conclusion was something that everybody already knew.

[Joy Christian]

Bell did not "discover" that nature is non-local. He demonstrated that any classical theory must be non-local if it has any ambition of reproducing the predictions of QM. That is why his paper initially had a rather lukewarm reception by his contemporary physicists; they were like "So what? Nobody belives in classical theories anyways these days, except as a useful macroscopic approximation." For instance Feynman hardly ever mentioned Bell's theorem, he felt that the theorem's conclusion was something that everybody already knew.

You are as uninformed as ever. Since 2007, there exists a local, realistic, and deterministic model of all quantum correlations, published in highly respected journals, despite many attempts by R. Gill to prevent their publications. Many participants of this forum know this already, but for those who are new to this forum, here are all the details of the publications of this model:

http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.21753.39529.
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[FrediFizzx]

And now Gill's junk theory is deader than a doornail!

https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/fredif ... D-forum.nb
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[gill1109]

Bell did not "discover" that nature is non-local. He demonstrated that any classical theory must be non-local if it has any ambition of reproducing the predictions of QM. That is why his paper initially had a rather lukewarm reception by his contemporary physicists; they were like "So what? Nobody belives in classical theories anyways these days, except as a useful macroscopic approximation." For instance Feynman hardly ever mentioned Bell's theorem, he felt that the theorem's conclusion was something that everybody already knew.

In fact, Feynman was annoyed when he heard about it, thought about it for a few minutes, and then proved the same theorem his own way. He didn’t publish it because nobody talked about Bell’s theorem, nobody cited Bell, for four or five years. But then Clauser was crazy enough to do his experiment with his student Freedman. He had waited till he got tenure to do it, because nobody believed quantum entanglement would continue to exist at any distance. Shimony then got excited and the CHSH paper came out with an inequality which could be useful in laboratory work. The Clauser-Horne inequality also came out, it too was designed for experimentalists, in fact, it has the same philosophy as Eberhard. (Eberhard’s contribution was not only to “merge” the “-1” outcomes with the “no shows” so as to get binary outcomes instead of ternary, but also to show that a much less weakly entangled state,with appropriate measurements, required much lower detector efficiency than CHSH). A handful of people published refutations. Bell published his refutation of those refutations. Then Aspect did his experiment. A whole lot later, detector efficiency reached the Eberhard limit, and the guys at NIST and in Vienna did their “loophole free” experiments in 2015. Just before that, Delft did their experiment with 100% detector efficiency thanks to the use of Bell’s idea of event-ready detectors (heralding). Munich followed.

As Heinera says, Bell experiments confirm quantum theory, and show that entanglement generates correlations which cannot be explained in a classical way. Schrödinger already intuited that that would be the case and he found it deeply disturbing. Einstein did not believe it. Physicists decided to “shut up and calculate”. The Nobel prize has gone to theoretical physicists who were spectacularly good at that, such as Gerard ’t Hooft and Marinus Veldhorst. But only after most of the particles in the standard model had been discovered in expensive high energy labs.

[Joy Christian]

Bell did not "discover" that nature is non-local. He demonstrated that any classical theory must be non-local if it has any ambition of reproducing the predictions of QM. That is why his paper initially had a rather lukewarm reception by his contemporary physicists; they were like "So what? Nobody belives in classical theories anyways these days, except as a useful macroscopic approximation." For instance Feynman hardly ever mentioned Bell's theorem, he felt that the theorem's conclusion was something that everybody already knew.

In fact, Feynman was annoyed when he heard about it, thought about it for a few minutes, and then proved the same theorem his own way. He didn’t publish it because nobody talked about Bell’s theorem, nobody cited Bell, for four or five years. But then Clauser was crazy enough to do his experiment with his student Freedman. He had waited till he got tenure to do it, because nobody believed quantum entanglement would continue to exist at any distance. Shimony then got excited and the CHSH paper came out with an inequality which could be useful in laboratory work. The Clauser-Horne inequality also came out, it too was designed for experimentalists, in fact, it has the same philosophy as Eberhard. (Eberhard’s contribution was not only to “merge” the “-1” outcomes with the “no shows” so as to get binary outcomes instead of ternary, but also to show that a much less weakly entangled state,with appropriate measurements, required much lower detector efficiency than CHSH). A handful of people published refutations. Bell published his refutation of those refutations. Then Aspect did his experiment.

And yet, no freaki'n Nobel Prize for over forty years --- hahahaha, hehehehe, hohohoho...
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[Joy Christian]

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It is quite funny that Bell believers are bending over backward in this thread to point out that Bell's theorem is junk physics --- not worthy of a Nobel Prize!
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[Heinera]

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It is quite funny that Bell believers are bending over backward in this thread to point out that Bell's theorem is junk physics --- not worthy of a Nobel Prize!
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Why should it be worthy of a Nobel prize? It's a trivial theorem, and only crack**ts can be obsessed with it. And claiming that it is wrong is a sure career killer. As evidenced on this forum.

[FrediFizzx]

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It is quite funny that Bell believers are bending over backward in this thread to point out that Bell's theorem is junk physics --- not worthy of a Nobel Prize!
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Why should it be worthy of a Nobel prize? It's a trivial theorem, and only crack**ts can be obsessed with it. And claiming that it is wrong is a sure career killer. As evidenced on this forum.

Only crackheads can think that it is possible that ANYTHING can exceed the bounds on the inequalities. QM can't do it. Experiments can't do it. The inequalities are worthless junk!
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[gill1109]

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It is quite funny that Bell believers are bending over backward in this thread to point out that Bell's theorem is junk physics --- not worthy of a Nobel Prize!
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Why should it be worthy of a Nobel prize? It's a trivial theorem, and only crack**ts can be obsessed with it. And claiming that it is wrong is a sure career killer. As evidenced on this forum.

Only crackheads can think that it is possible that ANYTHING can exceed the bounds on the inequalities. QM can't do it. Experiments can't do it. The inequalities are worthless junk!

So what is your opinion, Fred, of the Tsirelson inequality? It says that, assuming only that QM is true, so allowing states of any dimension and any measurements, S cannot exceed 2 sqrt 2. Joy also says it is true and says that it follows from his local realistic geometric algebra approach. Yet you say the only correct upper bound is 4. You say “experimenters use the wrong inequality” but experimenters don’t use any inequality at all. They measure correlations. Various experimenters have even reported violations of the Tsirelson bound. It’s easy to write computer simulation models which violate it. I recall some of your own (or by you and Joy together).

[Joy Christian]

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There are some (such as Henry Stapp, for example) who call Bell's theorem "the most profound discovery of science": https://physicsworld.com/a/john-bell-pr ... y-science/

And yet, no Nobel Prize for it for over 57 years. That is quite hilarious, to say the least.
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[Heinera]

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There are some (such as Henry Stapp, for example) who call Bell's theorem "the most profound discovery of science": https://physicsworld.com/a/john-bell-pr ... y-science/

And yet, no Nobel Prize for it for over 57 years. That is quite hilarious, to say the least.
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Henry Stapp doesn't award Nobel prizes. If the committee thought the theorem was wrong, I guess you would have been the recipient this year.

[Joy Christian]

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There are some (such as Henry Stapp, for example) who call Bell's theorem "the most profound discovery of science": https://physicsworld.com/a/john-bell-pr ... y-science/

And yet, no Nobel Prize for it for over 57 years. That is quite hilarious, to say the least.
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Henry Stapp doesn't award Nobel prizes.

Those who do award Nobel Prizes evidently think that the hype around Bell's junk theorem is moronic.
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[gill1109]

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There are some (such as Henry Stapp, for example) who call Bell's theorem "the most profound discovery of science": https://physicsworld.com/a/john-bell-pr ... y-science/
And yet, no Nobel Prize for it for over 57 years. That is quite hilarious, to say the least.

Henry Stapp doesn't award Nobel prizes.

Those who do award Nobel Prizes evidently think that the hype around Bell's junk theorem is moronic.

Evidently not. Brian David Josephson received the Nobel prize in 1973 for discovering the Josephson effect, a macroscopic quantum phenomenon. This led to the invention of the Josephson junction. Google's quantum computer "Sycamore" consists of 53 Josephson junctions, tiny electric circuits, on a single chip, super-cooled to enable superconductivity. The experimental evidence for "quantum supremacy" of this machine is pretty strong. It computed stuff in a very short time, which could not be computed on the best available classical supercomputers in hundreds of years. I think we can expect Nobel prizes connected to quantum computing and quantum information theory in a few years. I don't think that Joy Christian is going to be a recipient.

The ongoing debate about, and criticism of, Bell's theorem is important and stimulating but on the whole, in my opinion, pretty moronic. An awful lot of highly educated people do not know the relevant literature and are just regurgitating the criticism of Bell's critics - mainly based on misunderstanding of basic logic and basic concepts - raised in the early years after its publication.

[FrediFizzx]

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There are some (such as Henry Stapp, for example) who call Bell's theorem "the most profound discovery of science": https://physicsworld.com/a/john-bell-pr ... y-science/
And yet, no Nobel Prize for it for over 57 years. That is quite hilarious, to say the least.

Henry Stapp doesn't award Nobel prizes.

Those who do award Nobel Prizes evidently think that the hype around Bell's junk theorem is moronic.

Evidently not. Brian David Josephson received the Nobel prize in 1973 for discovering the Josephson effect, a macroscopic quantum phenomenon. This led to the invention of the Josephson junction. Google's quantum computer "Sycamore" consists of 53 Josephson junctions, tiny electric circuits, on a single chip, super-cooled to enable superconductivity. The experimental evidence for "quantum supremacy" of this machine is pretty strong. It computed stuff in a very short time, which could not be computed on the best available classical supercomputers in hundreds of years. I think we can expect Nobel prizes connected to quantum computing and quantum information theory in a few years. I don't think that Joy Christian is going to be a recipient.

The ongoing debate about, and criticism of, Bell's theorem is important and stimulating but on the whole, in my opinion, pretty moronic. An awful lot of highly educated people do not know the relevant literature and are just regurgitating the criticism of Bell's critics - mainly based on misunderstanding of basic logic and basic concepts - raised in the early years after its publication.

Only crackheads can think that it is possible that ANYTHING can exceed the bounds on the inequalities. QM can't do it. Experiments can't do it. The inequalities are worthless junk!
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