In Reply to: What is Bell's Theorum? posted by AG on January 30, 2004 at 04:37:50:
The easy one: http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/PVB/Harrison/BellsTheorem/Analogy.html
A little more complete: http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/PVB/Harrison/BellsTheorem/BellsTheorem.html
This whole thing was sort of a continuation (not too well accepted in public at the time) of somebody else's work in mathermatics (Kurt Goedel) on something called "the incompleteness theorem" (also known as the proof that God exists).
In short the idea is that at the quantum level (very small particles and systems) matter shows some strange behavior, which some (not all) scientist associate with what they call 'hidden variables'. There is a close relationship between mathematicians and theoretical physicists and they often borrow from each other so Einstein used that to discredit quantum mechanics, calling it an 'incomplete' system.
It turns out that quantum mechanics was soon answering some difficult puzzles in the behavior of quantum matter and going beyond relativistic physics.
Where many people make mistakes is at the interpretative level and popularization of some of the concepts. Quantum mechanics does not work on individual cases but on large samples and the values found are statistical significant on the population, as derived from the treatment. We cannot predict this or that in a particular case but we can say that in a large group of particles (such as photons in a light beam) the vast majority of time we should expect this to happen.
This is why some criminals get away with their crime but in general we can say that crime doesn't pay.
I gotta go now. Hope these links are of help.