Nowadays, it is commonly admitted that the experimental violation of Bell’s inequalities that was successfully demonstrated in the last decades by many experimenters, are indeed the ultimate proof of quantum physics and of its ability to describe the whole microscopic world and beyond. But the historical and scientific story may not be envisioned so clearly: it starts with the original paper of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) aiming at demonstrating that the formalism of quantum theory is incomplete. It then goes through the works of D. Bohm, to finally proceed to the famous John Bell’s relationships providing an experimental setup to solve the EPR paradox. In this communication is proposed an alternative reading of this history, showing that modern experiments based on correlations between light polarizations significantly deviate from the original spirit of the EPR paper. It is concluded that current experimental violations of Bell’s inequalities cannot be considered as an ultimate proof of the completeness of quantum physics models.

Date Published: 1 October 2013
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 8832, The Nature of Light: What are Photons? V, 88321J (1 October 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2023977

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8832:
The Nature of Light: What are Photons? V
Chandrasekhar Roychoudhuri; Al F. Kracklauer; Hans De Raedt, Editor(s)