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Quantum physics

Death by experiment for local realism

Nature volume 526, pages 649–650 (2015)Cite this article

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A fundamental scientific assumption called local realism conflicts with certain predictions of quantum mechanics. Those predictions have now been verified, with none of the loopholes that have compromised earlier tests. See Letter p.682

The world is made up of real stuff, existing in space and changing only through local interactions — this local-realism hypothesis is about the most intuitive scientific postulate imaginable. But quantum mechanics implies that it is false, as has been known for more than 50 years1. However, brilliantly successful though quantum mechanics has been, it is still only a theory, and no definitive experiment has disproved the local-realism hypothesis — until now. On page 682 of this issue, Hensen et al.2 report the first violation of a constraint called a Bell inequality, under conditions that prevent alternative explanations of the experimental data. Their findings therefore rigorously reject local realism, for the first time.

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Figure 1: Violation of a three-party Bell inequality.

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  1. Howard Wiseman is at the Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, Centre for Quantum Dynamics, Griffith University, Brisbane QLD 4111, Australia.,

    Howard Wiseman

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  1. Howard Wiseman
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Correspondence to Howard Wiseman.

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Wiseman, H. Death by experiment for local realism. Nature 526, 649–650 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15631

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