Talk: Guido Bacciagaluppi (Utrecht)

Title:

Against Local Causality

Abstract:

What do the violations of the Bell inequalities imply? According to much of the physics literature, they refute ‘local realism’, with an emphasis on ‘realism’; according to much of the philosophy literature instead, they refute ‘locality’ - whatever those two terms mean. In his last paper, Bell suggested they refute what he called 'local causality', which in turn he conceived as embodying the relativistic constraints on causality. In this talk, I criticise claims that the experimental violation of the Bell inequalities shows that the world is nonlocal in a way that is incompatible with the constraints of relativity, and criticise Bell's notion of 'local causality' as ambiguous and misleading with regard to such claims.