Alexander Afriat
Center for Philosophy of Science
University of Pittsburgh
and University of Urbino, Italy

"Altering the Remote Past"

Abstract:
I treat a "Bell scheme" -- by which I mean the well-known inequality representing the assumptions of local realism, together with the part of quantum theory with which they are to be compared -- as a bare formal structure, whose usual interpretation involving photons, polarizers, angles etc. is only one particular model. The structure has many other models; I propose one in which the parameters figuring in "Bell's observable" are times rather than directions. The violation of the inequality might then be taken to mean that a property of a system can be changed by the timing of a distant measurement, which could take place in the future: If we make a measurement tomorrow at five o'clock, here in Pittsburgh, two trains passed each other without incident at noon, 1 January 2000, in Tokyo. If we make the very same measurement at six o'clock instead, the same Japanese trains collided that same New Year's day (2000) at noon.

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