Wednesday 14 March 2012

Battle of the Giants

Last week Richard D.Gill has written an article (1) in an attempt to refute Joy Christian's work. Richard Gill is a mathematician and known for his discussions in the Hess-Philipp debate (7), and has written quite a few papers on quantum mechanics (5).


He focusses on the one page explanation from Joy Christian at Arxiv (2). The main argument seems to be whether a term in Joy's correlation formula is vanishing or not.
Only a week after Richard's article, Joy replied with an extensive response (3).

It cannot be a surprise to the frequent reader of this blog that I would like Joy Christian to be right on this. But knowing that I am a relative nitwit on geometrical algebra (GA) I am not in the position to judge the arguments. So I will try to remain objective.

So far the debate doesn't seem to have a winner. The pro-Christians have expressed their doubt about Richard understanding the mathematical GA rules used by Joy, and I must say he hasn't convinced me yet of the opposite in his replies.

Discussions can be followed on the FQXi archives (4, it's about time that FQXi chooses another interface for these: they are way too sluggish) and physicsforums (6).

ps. the arguments might be summarised by the formula's below, as extracted from some of the post at the FQXi blog (8). I think I do understand (this part of) Joy's math, but I don't know why one should want to 'multiply by lambda square=1' to get Richards formula.




Joy argues that since lambda is a fair coin, the last term in his formula will vanish when having a large number of repetitions. Richard has Beta(lambda) in the last term. This being equal to lambda Beta (see (2)) will result in lambda square, so the last term will not vanish.



  1. Simple refutation of Joy Christian's simple refutation of Bell's simple theorem, Richard D. Gill, http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.1504
  2. Disproof of Bell's Theorem, Joy Christian,  http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.1879
  3. Refutation of Richard Gill's Argument Against my Disproof of Bell's Theorem, Joy Christian, http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2529
  4. FQXi community: discussions: http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/995, http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/983
  5. Richard Gill on Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/find/quant-ph/1/au:+Gill_R/0/1/0/all/0/1
  6. http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=584996
  7. Comment on "Exclusion of time in the theorem of Bell" by K. Hess and W. Philipp, Richard D. Gill, http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0204169.pdf
  8. http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/995#post_50816

4 comments:

  1. battle ?? this is more like the obnoxious pupil who is now being slept around the ears with his sloppy homework by one of the teachers he continuously disrespected and who is being told that he probably should go back to mathematical kindergarten

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  2. There are three terms in equation (1). Multiply each of them by lambda times lambda and you get the three terms of the last line of the formula display. For the first term, use lambda lambda beta_j beta_k = beta_j(lambda) beta_k(lambda). For the second term, use lambda lambda = 1. For the third term, use lambda lambda beta_ = lambda beta_l(lambda).

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  3. Gill, thank you for your reaction on this blog post. It has been awhile since I have read all the arguments so I am not up to date with all the details anymore.
    But can you explain why you choose to multiply all elements of the formula with lambda squared? It seems to me this is different from what Joy does in his one page article, as discussed above.

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  4. If one has a true equation and one multiplies both sides of the equation by the same number one gets another true equation. eg 9 = 3^2, multiply both sides by -1, we get -9 = - (3^2). I chose to multiply both sides of one of Joy's equations by the same thing, then to do some correct algebraic manipulation of both sides (eg -9 = - 3 x 3 = (-3) x 3, in order to arrive at a new equation which must also be true if the first equation is, but which contradicts a different equation given by Joy. Of course what I do is different from what Joy does. I show that what Joy does must be wrong because it contradicts other things that he does.

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