User:Caroline Thompson
Caroline Thompson died 8 February 2006 (see her talk page or Deceased Wikipedians for further information). Her user page is preserved here.
I'm a full-time "independent mature student" who stumbled upon some facts about the experiments claimed as supporting "quantum entanglement" some ten years ago. I have since read a very considerable number of the original papers involved, including Alain Aspect's PhD thesis, and found other problems with the experimental evidence. When you check out the details of any individual experiment, you find that the possibility of local realist explanations, applying basically classical ideas, has never been ruled out.
I don't expect to change the world but I do feel that others should be able to find out the facts with rather less effort than me!
See my web site, http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/, for more. You will find there that I also have strong criticisms of many other areas of theoretical physics. The facts I have discovered concerning the Bell test experiments stand quite independently of these, however.
I started contributing to wikipedia in the summer of 2004, and created and/or modified existing pages to create a linked set related to Bell's theorem. As you will see below, my set lasted until about Christmas before being mangled almost out of all recognition. It seems that defenders of "established theory" do not wish the public to know too much about those "loopholes"!
Email: [email protected]
Web site: http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/
My contributions
The pages for which I was initially (summer, 2004) entirely responsible or almost so are:
- Bell's theorem
- Bell test loopholes
- Loopholes in optical Bell test experiments
- Bell test experiments
- Local hidden variable theory
- Clauser and Horne's 1974 Bell test
- CHSH inequality
The first and last of these replaced existing pages.
As from January 2005, some of the pages have been severely edited by others in an effort to eliminate what they see as self-promotion and failure to comply with a neutral point of view. The "Bell's Theorem" page, in particular, has become so corrupted as to be valueless. Both the "Bell test loopholes" and the "Bell inequalities" pages have now been re-directed and hence effecitively eliminated. The corrupted/eliminated pages can now be found as subpages of the current page, namely:
Some of the links will, unfortunately, not now be effective or will lead to redundancy.
See the talk pages for Bell's theorem and other pages for what I think the theorem is really all about. Bell's contribution was the "local realist" part. The quantum-theoretical part of the theorem was already known. You do not need to know quantum theory to be able to understand the local realist argument behind the Bell inequalities.
References to my own papers (often the most readable and informative available) have been edited out from most of the above pages. The papers in question are:
- Thompson, 1996: C. H. Thompson, The Chaotic Ball: An Intuitive Analogy for EPR Experiments, Found. Phys. Lett. 9, 357 (1996)
- Thompson, 2003: C. H. Thompson, Subtraction of 'accidentals' and the validity of Bell tests, Galilean Electrodynamics 14 (3), 43-50 (May 2003)
- Thompson, 2004a: C. H. Thompson, Setting the Record Straight on Quantum Entanglement (2004). This repeats the ealier description of the Chaotic Ball model, adding updated information on the validity of the various Bell tests and the experimental loopholes.
- Thompson, 2004b: C. H. Thompson, Clauser and Horne’s 1974 Bell inequality: a neglected escape route from the 'fair sampling' loophole (2004)
I'm hoping that a rational approach will eventually prevail, with wikipedia presenting an honest statement of the facts. As things stand at present, the "derivation" of a Bell's inequality presented in Bell's theorem is not valid, not even mentioning Bell's hidden variable argument. Bell's original inequality is not stated and the loopholes are barely mentioned, those that are being provided with no useful references.
It is evident that the people who have (since January 2005) been editing the pages with the idea of promoting the quantum theoretical point of view have not always been fully qualified for the task. Caroline Thompson 09:34, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)