Recent experimental and theoretical work on the violations of Bell's inequalities suggests that we are now at a watershed in quantum theory. In spite of this common perception, there is no clear consensus on the question of what our understanding of the issues really amounts to, nor what questions remain to be answered. In particular, there are two important tendencies which increasingly occur in the literature: (i) to claim that violations of inequalities need no explanation; or (ii) much remains to be explained though there is disagreement about what sort of explanation might be appropriate. Dr. Stairs supports an explanatory approach involving the notion of quantum holism. Regardless of which position one takes, Dr. Stairs has found that both approaches give rise to a curious puzzle. Jarrett's decomposition theorem shows that the locality condition used in deriving the inequalities consists of two independent components: "physical locality," which forbids faster than light signalling; and "completeness" or "factorizability," which requires stochastic independence of outcomes. It is generally agreed that violations of physical locality would call for explanation in a way that violations of factorizability may not. But both options (i) and (ii) seem unable to respect this distinction. With support from this grant, Dr. Stairs will articulate this puzzle and investigate the issues to which it gives rise. His aim is the further articulation and defence of holism as a tool for understanding quantum mechanics.
