The GHSZ argument: a gedankenexperiment requiring more denken

Abstract

I reassess the gedankenexperiment of Greenberger, Horne, Shimony and Zeilinger after twenty-five years, finding their influential claim to discovery of an inconsistency inherent in high dimensional formulations of local realism to arise from a fundamental error of logic. They manage this by presuming contradictory premises: that a specific linear combination of four angles involved in their proposed parallel experiments on two pairs of electrons equals both $\pi$ and $0$ at the same time. Ignoring this while presuming the contradictory implications of these two conditions, they introduce the contradiction themselves. The notation they use in their "derivation" is not sufficiently ornate to represent the entanglement in the double electron spin pair problem they design, confounding their error. The situation they propose actually motivates only an understanding of the full array of symmetries involved in their problem. In tandem with the error now recognized in the supposed defiance of Bell's inequality by quantum probabilities, my reassessment of their work should motivate a reevaluation of the current consensus outlook regarding the principle of local realism and the proposition of hidden variables.