Joy Christian wrote:Jochen wrote:None of the links you give provides an answer to the question I'm asking in this thread, which is, again: How are the vectors w, the physical hidden variables, computed without using knowledge about the experimenters' measurement directions?
Please, this is silly. If you have an answer to my question, post it; if you don't, well, either fess up or, failing that, at least try to save some dignity and stop this childish behaviour. It's embarrassing.
minkwe wrote:This is BS, the quantum mechanical predictions are for practical measurements. QM is completely silent about what might exist apart from measurements.
Yes, but there is a difference between the QM expectation value
![](http://latex.codecogs.com/png.latex?\langle O \rangle = \mathrm{tr}(\rho O))
and the experimental mean obtained by measuring O some finite number of times; the latter can only ever approximate the former, and to what degree depends on the quality of the experiment. So if you reduce that quality, then the bounds that can be put on the estimate of the QM prediction get worse; hence, one has to correct for this in some way, which is done using various Bell inequalities derived under the assumption of imperfect measurements, while Bell's original thinking was directed at the in principle predictions.
minkwe wrote:If you want to claim my simulations do things which are forbidden by QM, it should be up to you to show exactly what you are talking about and provide the experimental results to back it up.
That's not what I'm arguing; I'm merely saying that your simulations violate an inequality not applicable in the scenario you use, which is no great surprise.
minkwe wrote:If you want to talk about "loopholes", demonstrate that such loopholes are forbidden by QM, or that QM does not "exploit" those same "loopholes" as well. Unless you can do so, your efforts here are akin to goal-post shifting.
Nobody knows whether the Bell inequality violations are not due to some loophole; that's why there is such a great effort towards loophole-free tests. And in order to do that, the tools that are used, i.e. the Bell inequalities, have to be constructed with the experimental setup in mind. As I said, Bell was mainly concerned with the predictions made by QM itself, not by the approximations to those predictions obtainable by experiment.
minkwe wrote:My simulations are clearly counter-examples of Bell's theorem as outlined by Bell himself. If Bell's inequalities and theorem were full-proof, it won't be necessary to amend it with new inequalities. Feel free to post an amended Bell's theorem for which my simulations are not counter-examples.
Your simulations are not counter examples to the original Bell theorem, since again, you consider a scenario not covered by its derivation, which is well known and acknowledged.
Besides, Gill's comment is very much on point: in Bell's 1981 article,
Bertlmann's Socks and the Nature of Reality, he shows that he was keenly aware that his inequalities apply only in an idealised experimental setting:
Bell wrote:It is true that practical experiments fall far short of the ideal, because of counter inefficiencies, or analyzer inefficiencies, or geometrical imperfections, and so on. It is only with added assumptions, or conventional allowance for inefficiencies and extrapolation from the real to the ideal, that one can say the inequality is violated.
(However, could we please stop the Gill bash-fest, or at least move it somewhere else? You guys don't like him, I get it. Everybody gets it.)
Joy Christian wrote:In fact, anyone who has actually read through the commentary in the simulation should be able to see how misguided Jochen's entire presentation of his "question" is.
Again, if you want to accuse me of misrepresenting your simulation, please show where my presentation is wrong.