an article in irish times
DESCRIPTION
Robert Anton Wilson's featured article on Bell's Theorem in the Irish TimesTRANSCRIPT
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THE IRISH TIMES, MONIDAY, AUGUST l, 1gg3
LETTERS to the EDITORBELL'S THEOREM
A Chara. - It was a shecrdelight to rcad Howard's Kinlay'sarticle on Bell's Theorem (July 26)b c c a u s c t h i s p a r t i c u l a rmathcmatical dcmonstretion mavwell bc, as Mr. Kinlay clalms, thi:most importsnt singlc discovcry inthc history of sciencc and itsimp l ica t ions are a t leas t asinteresting and perhap's cven moremind-boggling than th currentnational debate about whether thcgoat who cats an acorn thereby[ills a real oak or only a potentia'loaK, or now many zygotes candance on thc head of a pin.
Bell's mathematics proves that,if quantum thcory is valid, anytwo particlcs oncc in contact willcontinuc to be instantancouslvconelated no matter how far apan'thcy subscqucntly movc. Whatthis means is, howcver, quitepuzzling and it mav not rifutcEinstcii's detcrminisri at all, con-trary to Mr Kinlay. Thcrc arc, inf a c t , s e v e r a l p h i l o s o p h i c a l"models" of what Bellrs dis-
and thc appearancc of scparateminds can only be a figment; inshort, there is, as Spinoza alsokncw, no individual frcc will insuch a univcrse.
Howcvcr, this does not meanthat "sciencc has provcn Spinozaright," since there are altcrnativeverbal models of Bell's mathe-mati6. Indeed, to believe therc isonly one intcrpretation is the-ology, not scicnce. The mostpopular alternative to super-deterministic monism is Dr DavidBohm's model of hidden variables,wNch assume that soace and timeare unreal, i.e. ari information-stacking devices of the humanncrvous system and not factsabout thc un iversc . (Bohm,Wholeness and the ImolicateOrdcr.) This seems to liad usback to Platonism or at leastimplics the Platonic notion thatwhat wc sec is unrcal while thetruc Rcality is what wc do not andcannot sc.
A third modcl, created by DrJack Sarfatti and his school,as6umes tha t thc non- loca lconnectedness betwcen particlcsdescribcd by Bell mcans that eomeform of information is travellinefaster than licht between thc oartilcles. This ian casilv leail toconclusion that it is tieorcticallvpossible to communicate with thi:bast and lands us in all thebaradoxes o f sc icncc- f i c t ion .Anothcr model implies thst Bcll's
non-local conncctcdness occur inonc universe at a time, and thefamous quanlum randomness pro-duccs cqually rcal* universcs' insupcr-spacc on all "sidcs" of us,so to spcak. (Both of thesc modclsare discussd bv Talbot. Mvsd.cism and Modei Physrcs.) T6ereis a lso the non-Ar is to te l ianapproach of von Neumann andFinkelstein which holds that theuniversc contains morc than"yes" and "no" choices - that itc o n t a i n s a " m a v b e " i nFinklestein's witty metdphor. Andthc Copenhagen view'of NielsBohr still cxists for many physi-cists; this assures us iha't
-allformatisms (equations) includincBell 's are n