Physicists study links between locality, causality, and free will

Physicists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN), City, University of London, and Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen have published research addressing the fundamental relationship between causality, locality, and free will.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), explores the dilemma presented by the violation of Bell inequalities. Researchers are faced with a choice: either accept a vision of reality where the assumption of the experimenter's free will is questioned, or reject the principle of locality in experimental processes.

Dr. hab. Paweł Błasiak, the lead author, explains that local realism implies that physical interactions cannot occur instantaneously and that an experiment's outcome should only be influenced by its immediate surroundings rather than distant cosmic events. The findings suggest dependencies that extend beyond standard quantum mechanics.