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Finally, Bell’s predictions were confirmed in Paris, in 1982 by Alain Aspect and his colleagues. How they did it?
Well, they used polarisation-correlated light emerging in different directions from a source of heated calcium atoms. A detector was set up in the path of each beam of photons, which included a switch that changed the polarisation setting of one of the detectors over ten-billionth of a second (shorter than the standard travel time of light or any other local signal between the two detectors).
The change in the polarisation setting of the detector was found to change the outcome of measurement in the other location... just as quantum mechanics predicts.
It was very clear that the two rays of photons were in communication, and since there was no known local means whereby this could happen, the conclusion was that they must be linked in some way outside our our normal world of space and time.
The methaphor to try to understand this is to compare it as observing a fish on two television sets simultaneously. As one fish moves, so does the other, in perfect synchronicity. If each of those TV pictures were to be assumed to be the primary reality, this might suggest that the two fish were exchanging some kind of hidden local signals, when in reality we know that the primary reality comes from a television studio elsewhere. That primary reality is then non-local.
The Aspect’s experiment proved that simultaneously occurring events in our space-time world can be related meaningfully to a common cause that resides in a non-local realm outside space and time. It was acclameid as proof-positive that there is something missing from what we have understood as realism. The implications are preoccupying physicists today, for whom the challenge has become the quest for a mathematical expression that will describe and integrate all we know of reality, including non-locality. (Stein, 1996)...
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