The Violation Of Bell's Inequality Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Davies & Gribbin (1992: 217-8):

Although Bohr provided a defence of his position in the face of this formidable challenge, the case rested until the 1960s as a pure thought experiment. Then John Bell of CERN extended the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment to a wider class of two-particle processes, producing general rules that all such systems must obey if they are to comply with Einstein's "common sense" picture of reality. Bell found that these rules incorporate a mathematical restriction now known as Bell's inequality. For the first time, it became possible to consider an actual laboratory test of these ideas. If the experiments showed that Bell's inequality is obeyed, Einstein would be proved right; but if the inequality was violated, Einstein would be proved wrong. Following Bell's work, a series of careful experiments has been performed, culminating in an accurate test of Bell's inequality by Alain Aspect, of the University of Paris, in 1982. Aspect's experiment consisted of performing simultaneous measurements on pairs of oppositely directed photons that were emitted in a single event from the same atom, and so possessed correlated properties. The results? Einstein was wrong. This conclusion has since been confirmed by repeated experiments.

Assuming one rules out faster-than-light signalling, it implies that once two particles have interacted with one another they remain linked in some way, effectively parts of the same indivisible system. This property of "nonlocality" has sweeping implications. We can think of the Universe as a vast network of interacting particles, and each linkage binds the participating particles into a single quantum system. In some sense the entire Universe can be regarded as a single quantum system. Although in practice the complexity of the cosmos is too great for us to notice this subtle connectivity except in special experiments like those devised by Aspect, nevertheless there is a strong holistic flavour to the quantum description of the Universe.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, particles are not linked parts of the same system, but interdependent instances of the same system. That is, the relation is not of part to whole (extension: composition), but of token to type (ascription: instantiation).

From this perspective, the violation of Bell's inequality demonstrates the interdependency of instances of potential, in the construing of experience as meaning.