History leading to Bell's inequality and experiments - Texas A&M University (TAMU) Scholar

Societ Italiana di Fisica. A brief history of the beginnings of quantum mechanics will be presented together with arguments regarding its interpretation; including the very important, but ignored, argument by Grete Hermann. The early discussions were basically philosophical and it was not until Bell produced his inequality that an experimental test became a real possibility. Nevertheless, in the two decades following Bells development of his inequality, there was a negative attitude by many physicists towards questioning quantum mechanics and a disdain for doing experiments to test a Bell inequality. Nevertheless, four experiments were done in the 1970s by young physicists at the beginning of their careers; those initial experiments and their results will be briefly described. It should be noted that by the 1980s and with the completion of the experiments led by the young Alain Aspect, the culture had begun to change and many experiments have since been done; these culminate in the three recent tests of Bell inequalities that for the first time simultaneously closed both the detection and locality loopholes.

History leading to Bell's inequality and experiments Conference Paper