billschnieder said:
So I'm not sure what you mean by "round" in anything I described.
Same thing as you mean by "pair", except I prefer the more agnostic language: the point of Bell's theorem is to prove certain constraints on the statistics allowed by locally causal theories. It's not a result specifically about entangled photons.
You can find the argument laid out clearly in three posts #270, #345 and #346.
I thought I already got the point from your post #346. Let's consider the scenario and model you propose: we measure three photon pairs. All the possible outcomes for each pair are predetermined by lists \lambda_{i} = (a_{i}, b_{i}, c_{i},\; i=1,2,3, and we consider the case where Alice and Bob measure the ab term on the first pair, the ac term on the second, and bc on the third. You want to pick terms in the list such that the Bell correlator
S_{123} = a_{1} b_{1} + a_{2} c_{2} - b_{3} c_{3}
attains its maximal possible value of 3. No problem: just take, for instance, a_{1} = a_{2} = b_{1} = b_{3} =c_{2} = 1 and c_{3} = -1. This already fixes six of the nine variables you have to play around with.
If Alice and Bob instead decide to first measure bc, then ab, and finally ac in that order, then you can use the remaining three free variables to maximise the relevant Bell correlator
S_{231} = a_{2} b_{2} + a_{3} c_{3} - b_{1} c_{1}
by setting b_{2} = 1 and a_{3} = c_{2} = -1. But now all the variables are fixed, and you still have four more orders in which Alice and Bob could measure the three terms, which now have fixed values:
\begin{eqnarray}<br />
S_{312} &=& -3 \,, \\<br />
S_{132} &=& 1 \,, \\<br />
S_{213} &=& 1 \,, \\<br />
S_{321} &=& 1 \,.<br />
\end{eqnarray}
So in this hypothetical scenario, Alice and Bob only observe a violation if they measure the three terms in one of two specific orders (ab, ac, bc, or bc, ab, ac).
Of course, something like this was inevitable simply because
\begin{eqnarray}<br />
S_{123} + S_{231} + S_{312} &=& S_{111} + S_{222} + S_{333} \leq 3 \,, \\<br />
S_{132} + S_{213} + S_{321} &=& S_{111} + S_{222} + S_{333} \leq 3 \,.<br />
\end{eqnarray}
This is what I meant by "tuning". Arrange the hidden variables in such a way that Alice and Bob will see a Bell violation for a particular sequence of measurements they could perform, and you will inevitably sabotage the correlator for other sequences of measurements they could just as well perform.