Restoring Local Causality and Objective Reality to the Entangled Photons

Unlike our basic theories of space and time, quantum mechanics is not a locally causal theory. Moreover, it is widely believed that any hopes of restoring local causality within a realistic theory have been undermined by Bell’s theorem and its supporting experiments. By contrast, we provide a strictly local, deterministic, and realistic explanation for the correlations observed in two such supporting experiments, performed independently at Orsay and Innsbruck. To this end, a pair of local variables is constructed to simulate detections of photon polarizations at various angles, chosen freely by Alice and Bob. These generate purely random outcomes: A = ± 1 and B = ± 1. When these outcomes are compared, however, the correlation between them turn out to be exactly equal to − cos 2(α− β), with the corresponding CHSH inequality violated for the polarization angles α, α′, β, and β′ in precisely the manner predicted by quantum mechanics. The key ingredient in our explanation is the topology of the 3-sphere, which remains closed under multiplication, thus preserving the locality condition of Bell. It allows us to model the physical space as a 3-sphere, and reveals that the illusion of quantum nonlocality in the present case stems from a twist in the Hopf fibration of the 3-sphere.