harrylin said:
Hi Jolb what I said plus the summary that I cited largely implies what you say here. However, I don't think that I "extended" the definition of SR; for sure it was a common definition (or qualifier) in the early days. I have not seen any book or paper on SR from before the Bell theorem discussion that defines SR as limited by "information transfer bounded by c" (did you?). And clearly explaining the issue has nothing to do with "throwing away the baby with the bath water"!
For historical reasons, you make a valid point, but I do not think that what you said clearly explains the issue. Your answer does not make it clear that you are adopting an obsolescent view of SR which has been replaced in the literature since the time of Bell--instead it seems to stress that QM and SR are incompatible. (I've never studied a relativity text older than Bell's Theorem--why bother with such relics? Even MTW came out in 1973.)
When two theories are incompatible, this is usually an indication that at least one of them is wrong, we must choose one or the other. If QM and SR were incompatible, then we would think that something is wrong with one or the other. Are we to throw away QM or SR, despite the fact that both are wildly successful? (This would be "throwing away the baby with the bathwater" because it doesn't separate out the "bathwater" that causes the incompatibility.)
Luckily we can avoid having to choose QM or SR since a slightly modified version of SR can save compatibility. The modification that is needed is the one I said--abandon the strict SR assumption in the antique books and instead adopt a slightly looser SR definition that works to make the two theories compatible, without modifying any of the predictions of SR. In effect, we just cut the junk that got us in trouble out of the definition. (This is "throwing away the bathwater" without throwing away either of the QM or SR "babies".) This is the modern approach, and most textbooks from the last forty years will simply sidestep the whole problem by never bothering to state the antique SR definition.
In fact the historical development of this redefining of SR is a nice allegory for why we shouldn't bother stressing the antique assumptions of SR. The adherents of the antique view (everything bounded by c) said that Bell's theorem is incompatible with SR, and (assuming Bell's Theorem was derived correctly from QM) an experiment would support one or the other theory. I imagine that the SR guys were even excited that there might be an experiment which could verify the classical-relativistic physical picture and show that there is a problem with the more controversial QM physical picture. A few years later, Alain Aspect did the experiment, and lo and behold, there were superluminal correlations observed in the data. So QM is right! So the SR guys had to change their theory to save it. That is where the theory is now.
Do we bother talking about how generations of physicists believed in negative-mass matter called Phlogiston? Or do we just skip right to the modern view?
