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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

Worth reading because it has an interesting, new (to me, at least) and approachable explanation of local realism.

Money quote:

    Perhaps the best way to explain local 
    realism is that it’s the thing you believe in, 
    if you believe all the physicists babbling 
    about “quantum entanglement” just 
    missed something completely obvious.

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Forget the realism part. Can we at least get the locality part?

In my mind, all the quantum observables are not real properties, therefor it's obvious/trivial that they don't exist until measured. That is, I have no problem accepting they are not "real".

What gets to me is the locality aspect of it.

Of course I'm not a physicist (read: I am layman).

Not a physicist either, but I think "local realism" is a conjunction of "local" and "realism". Bell inequality experiments show that "local realism" is false, and so we have to reject either "local" or "realism", but we don't necessarily have to reject both.

Best i can tell local realism basically means that if something blows up at the other side of the universe, it should not affect whatever is happening on this side until we can observe said event via the reception of energy/particles from said event.

Well that's the problem with local realism. All sorts of things do affect local conditions at a distance. If entanglement between particle pairs is not affected by any of the physical forces as described then whatever happens between them is just a matter of fact, but no where have I seen this mean we'll ever get ansibles or teleportation. It just means the universe as a substructure we're not fully able to grasp and that it may be just one of those things that connects everything despite the appearance of separation of objects and states.

that quote,and pretty much whole blog post, is among the best illustrations of orthodoxy. Speaking about obvious - the paper contains S>2 for entangled case. For some, probably obvious reason, the paper doesn't contain S for non-entangled case. We know that is should be <=2. Why not to show it? Their setup is exactly one very suitable to run without entanglement. From there i stand it actually would be >2 in their setup even for non-entangled case.

What problem do you have with the orthodoxy?

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