Author(s)

Karl Hess¹, Hans De Raedt², Kristel Michielsen^3,4

¹Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA.
²Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands.
³Institute for Advanced Simulation, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Jülich, Germany.
⁴RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany.

Counterfactual definiteness must be used as at least one of the postulates or axioms that are necessary to derive Bell-type inequalities. It is considered by many to be a postulate that not only is commensurate with classical physics (as for example Einstein’s special relativity), but also separates and distinguishes classical physics from quantum mechanics. It is the purpose of this paper to show that Bell’s choice of mathematical functions and independent variables implicitly includes counterfactual definiteness. However, his particular choice of variables reduces the generality of his theory, as well as the physics of all Bell-type theories, so significantly that no meaningful comparison of these theories with actual Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiments can be made.

Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Foundations of Probability, Bell Inequality

Hess, K. , Raedt, H. and Michielsen, K. (2016) Counterfactual Definiteness and Bell’s Inequality. Journal of Modern Physics, 7, 1651-1660. doi: 10.4236/jmp.2016.713150.