Celebrating the Prize for Bell Experiments

A new paper starts:

The 2022 Physics Nobel Prize was not quite like any other. While the Nobel prizes in physics are always of interest to the physics community, by a rule, they are merely a matter of curiosity for the general public. However, the latest Nobel award should pertain to all of us, ir- respective of the profession, and remind us that it’s been a time to rethink our basic worldviews.

No, it did not change anyone's worldview. The experiments only confirmed what had been conventional wisdom since 1930.

While there might not be a consensus on whether it is the idea of separability (locality) or reality that should give in, or maybe that we live in countless parallel universes, there is an absolute consensus in contemporary physics that the hopes of ever returning to anything resembling classical physics are long over.

Again, classical physics has been rejected since 1930.

Einstein, who still believed that the universe is something akin to a huge deterministic clockwork mechanism, was essentially the sole exception among this elite – and his expectations in this context were, as we have seen, explicitly proven wrong.

That's right, Einstein was one of the last holdouts, clinging to classical ideas that everyone else had rejected.

And, finally, once it was experimentally established that Bell’s inequalities are indeed violated in our universe, we encountered a truly unique situation in the entire history of science. Never before has humanity been in the necessity to abandon an entire paradigm because of a proof of mathematical nature that could guarantee that our previous scientific view – in a quite broad sense – was plainly wrong. ... We are speaking of abandoning the entire scientific worldview that was absolutely dominant for a few centuries (at least in exact sciences). It was dominant to the extent that we, for the most part, tacitly understood it surely must be the correct one, so that rarely anyone even bothered to question it.

People were saying this in around 1930, as the pre-1925 classical physics had been abandoned on atomic scales.

The paper quotes historical physicists, and discusses a range of Bell issues from many-worlds to superdeterminism.

It is indeed remarkable that everyone accepted the new quantum theory between 1925 and 1930. Everyone but Einstein. But it is old news, as has been for 90 years. It is almost as if someone concocted a new way to test relativity theory, and then all the science journals published essays about the reality of time.