Karl Hess (hidden variables)

Today I attended a seminar by Karl Hess (University of Illinois) about
quantum information. I cannot find much about him on spr. It seems that
he is being generally ignored now.

But anyway, he started with a general introduction about great
controversies between Mach and Boltzmann, and between Bohr and Einstein.

I was dreaming away, but then there was something about polarizers
(slide of polaroid glasses). Hess said that as someone who had worked on
many-body physics, he knew that there could be hidden variables in the
detector, for example the nuclear spins in the polaroid. I interrupted
to say that nuclear spins do not affect a polarizer's optical
properties, but he said there were experiments, blabla.

Later he described an Alice & Bob experiment. He said one could explain
the outcomes by assuming that A & B each had synchronized watches and
that they answered "1" when their clock was on even seconds (or
nanoseconds) and "0" on odd clock readings, and he claimed that this
showed that Bell's theorem was wrong.

After the talk Hess denied that his theory was about preordination. He
also denied that his clock-idea was a non-local theory. I countered that
a common time reference would be needed to prevent the clocks from
running out of phase with eachother; he said that no very-long-term
experiments had been done.

Hess proposed an experiment where the arms would be randomly varying in
length. When I said that one knew what the outcome of such an experiment
would be, I was labeled a dogmatic adherent of quantum orthodoxy.

--
"Electrons damage the brain," said Farish. (Donna Tartt)

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