PeterDonis said:
I wasn't just asking for experiments, I was asking for models. Before you can even think about doing an experiment to compare the predictions of models, you have to have models to compare.
The same answer applies - the difference between these flavors seems to be philosophical to me, i.e. a matter of interpretation.
There was some discussion in this thread about the difference between theories / models / interpretations, and to me it's pretty simple; interpretation operates beyond the observational limits, and will be a subject to everyone's philosophical / ideological bias. I don't personally find it interesting or meaningful to debate which one might be correct, but I find it interesting to discuss the actual ideological differences between interpretations, and to draw attention to the cases where people confuse their interpretation of a theory with reality itself. It will never be possible to conclusively find how reality is, because infinite number of
observationally identical interpretations can always be derived from any model or theory (the fundamental reason being that any theory is always based on some
finite set of data).
The important part of Bell's Theorem to me is that it implies strongly that at least one of the following concepts must be relaxed by any self-consistent theory / model / interpretation - 1. realism (relating to consciousness effect), 2. localism, or 3. the idea that information propagates literally as particles.
I don't care to debate which choices are somehow "more correct" - we can't know and I can easily form all sorts of models based on these ideas. But it is interesting that the last possibility is not very commonly discussed, while it does open a very real possibility for a local realist interpretation, which ought to have
utility, even if you can never prove it over the other choices.
If you think about it, really it only involves establishing a clear boundary to wave-like information propagation - which quite easily lands on the quantized energy absorption event of atoms. Meaning, that interaction would represent the "collapse of a wave function" - only it represents it by absorbing some amount of wave energy out from the system.
It might be that the reason why this route is not very well explored is that it - at least superficially - represent a philosophy that is not commonly very well liked in physics - the idea that there "exists unobservable things". In this model, wave-like energy levels that fall below an absorption threshold (e.g. anything left over from a quantized absorption) may feel to some like an unobservable thing that ought to not exist in a model. So it might feel philosophically cumbersome idea. But actually if you follow this line of thought through, it would have to represent the noise from the rest of the universe, that would invisibly impact all of our measurements, making energy detection events seemingly probabilistic (because we can only factor in the known contribution). And if you follow this even further, you realize we
have models where we choose to view things exactly like this; this is how we view transparent materials - as absorption not happening because the energy levels are too low for the atoms in the material. And in that case we view the energies as remaining in wave form throughout the materials (as an explanation to refraction).
So it is quite remarkable that Bell Experiment in this context would also yield lower energy levels as per usual cos^2(angle) correlation because you would view it as the actual classical waves getting dampened by their offset to the filter. That would yield a re-oriented "smaller wave" (with a fractional direction component removed), and that would have an impact on the probability of detection at the detection plate - exactly cosine correlation.
Whereas any interpretation where the information/energy passed through the filters as particles with discrete properties, you have to employ either non-realism or non-localism to explain it. Which of course you can. Of course what we call "particles" may well be manifestations of something that has got connections beyond our ability to observe them. Who knows.
I'm happy to discuss more details of possibilities of modeling this type of view, but that's beyond the scope of this thread. I'd like to keep this on a more philosophical level - as is the purpose of this forum.
Cheers
-Anssi