The educated public have long been regaled with “the mysteries of quantum physics”, which enshroud far-flung claims, e.g. that the moon does not exist when we are not looking at it. These mysteries rely on a stunning proposition of quantum theory arising in the 1960s and contested through the subsequent sixty years: that the probabilities deriving from it defy a mathematical inequality known as Bell’s inequality. John Bell himself, who formulated the problem, was puzzled by this result and mooted that in time we would discover what was wrong with this characterisation of the matter.
In this book, Frank Lad claims to have identified the mathematical error that gives rise to the misunderstanding, and presents it in a form that is accessible to the generally educated reader, especially those familiar with university-level ideas of functions of several variables and the concepts of linear algebra. Understanding of complete mathematical detail is not required for appreciation. Largely ignored and dismissed by the scientific community of professional physicists, here is the background to the result, and the resolution to the controversy.