The author is a former postdoc, who was active in academia in the 1970s, and then reappeared on the scene in 2017 to write this paper.
If he has indeed 'refuted' Bell's Theorem (and thus undermined the foundations of large swaths of theoretical Quantum Mechanics), one might expect he'd have at least one collaborator, a current research affiliation, and the interest of a journal with an impact factor greater than 2. It's possible he is the mythical solitary untrained genius, shunned by the establishment and producing Nobel-prize caliber research in his basement. That's probably not the way to bet, though.
Sure. But it is not forbidden.
Besides the odd circumstances, what outs me off is that he tries to link himself with former (well known) universities. He may have attended them, but he is in no way affiliated with them anymore. Crackhead-alarm
The problem is that (ignoring MA3) until the section "Predicting measurement results for the initial context" (inclusive) it is totally trivial if you have a background in Physics and Quantum Mechanics. It's not the usual model because it uses one (or two?) hidden variables, but it's easy to understand.
But the next section "Predicting measurement results for an arbitrary context" is totally unintelligible.
My guess is that the unintelligible part is hiding that when you measure a photon with a polarizer with an angle alpha, the other photon gets that information with an implicit faster than light communication. I have read it three times and I gave up.
To convince the scientific community it will be good to implement this model and post it in github or something.
* One function that create a pair of entangled photons X and Y.
* One function f that takes the photon X and the angle alpha and says if it passed the filter.
* One function g that takes the photon Y and the angle beta and says if it passed the other filter.
Bonus points if f and g are the same functions (or the only change is a pi/2).
No cheating, like using alpha in g, or assuming that alpha is 0.
Run a Montecarlo simulation and show that it gets the expected result. It's like 30 lines of Python or Fortran or whatever.
Transforming this to an analytical calculation is easy, but in an analytical calculations is easier to hide a change of variables and another trick that "transmit" alpha from one detector to the other.
(Straight implementation of Kupczynski Marian Closing the Door on Quantum Nonlocality https://philarchive.org/archive/KUPCTDv1 )
(Note for others: This is not an implementation of the OP method, it's another paper with a somewhat similar topic.)
It's an interesting model, but I don't like some details.
It generates a pair of (not entangled) photons with the same polarization (actually, +pi/2). Then it has two detectors.
In each detector the first secret parameter is equivalent to the usual calculation of the probability that a photon that has a polarization that is not aligned with the polarizer pass. If you can buy perfect/magical detectors that has the second secret parameter equal to zero, then this is just equivalent to the usual model with non entangled photons. And it should not break the Bell inequality.
The second secret parameter of each detector tries to model that the detectors sometimes miss a photon. I still don't like the model they are using, but it's not my specialty. Anyway, usually noise and fluky detectors make the result look more like classic results, so I expect that this second parameter makes the result not break the Bell inequality.
The problem is that it is possible to make very careful experiments that break the Bell inequality, so I don't understand what their model tries to show.
>The problem is that it is possible to make very careful experiments that break the Bell inequality, so I don't understand what their model tries to show.
Their plausible and local model aim to (and does!) reproduce the QM probabilities observed by experimenters (for all alpha and beta settings) and therefore does violate Bell inequality.
>It generates a pair of (not entangled) photons with the same polarization (actually, +pi/2)
The photon pair is entangled. The polarization is definite (and with a pi/2 offset between the pair) but unknown to the observer which is therefore measuring a distribution, that the key point. It's proposing an explanation of what entanglement is.
If alpha=beta or alpha=beta+90°, then the number of coincidences is approximately 500,000 (of the 20,000,000 tries)
If alpha=beta+45°, then the number of coincidences is only 1,500. i.e. like 300 times smaller.
Such a difference is would be very easy to see experimentally, and it is not the case. The number of coincidences independent of the angle between the sensors (with some noise, as always).
This filter is picking only the photons that have an angle phi that is very close to (alpha+beta)/2 or (alpha+beta)/2+90°.
For example if you have V=9.0 for alpha=beta+90° you have nbselected = 5622861 and for alpha=beta+45° nbselected = 1527848 That's only 3.7 times smaller.
But the main point of the paper is to have a really simple model to highlight the pointlessness of Bell theorem rather than point to a specific mistakes by experimenters.
0.9536987797308330
0.9540514229678816
0.9534108516112525
0.9540204547111079
0.9535252821469831
0.9538811736228740
0.9541386030170054
0.9534090666514868
0.9538249532069655
0.9535418321159825
(It is weird, but if alpha=0, and V=9, and you change beta, then the error is very close to (45-beta)/1000, where beta is in degrees. It's probably not exactly 1000, because using a number in degrees is weird, but it's similar.)
The problem is not to find an alternative algorithm that predicts one of the results, the problem is finding one that predicts correctly all the results.
It smoothly deforms the distribution between classical and QM, and the results look less like theoretical QM, and more like a experimental QM (in practice it's hard to observe 2.0*sqrt(2.0) theoretical violation of BI).
There is quite a lot of modelling freedom, to hide the distribution into the noise.
The whole question is what's more likely between experimenters missing photon pairs to the noise due to a systemic misconception in a complex experimental setup, or have the universe be non-local.
>The problem is not to find an alternative algorithm that predicts one of the results, the problem is finding one that predicts correctly all the results.
A model which predict all the results (Hint : Fields), will be more complex and even less likely to convince anyone.
Bell's theorem is a mathematical version of those onceyouseeit images ( https://twitter.com/TimKietzmann/status/1390405523430850562 ) where you realize that there is in fact nothing to see.
It's not about what is more likely or which model I prefer. It's about which model gives accurate prediction that agree with the experimental results. (Or if you want to be more technical, which one has not been falsified.)
It's evidence of the reasoning bug.
A circular reasoning logical fallacy due to the definition of what measurement and entanglement is.
Assume you are a creature living in a simulated local universe which works according to the above code, you can make the same measurements QM did and you could be holding all the arguments that Bell did and conclude that the world is non-local. Which is false by definition.
Scientists who know their stuff don't need a who. They can go purely on what.
If many such scientists accept something, then I think the scientific community will be convinced.
In the absence of this judgement from more knowledgeable scientists, people like me need to rely on who.