The Collapse of Bell Determinism

Abstract

The Bell-Kochen-Specker conditions (BKS) for a deterministic noncontextual hidden-variable model are wonderfully simple to state, deal with just one-dimensional projectors on a Hilbert space H and make no reference to a probabilistic phase space or quantum system. They only ask for an assignment of zero or one to every projector such that the assignment respects orthogonal resolutions of the identity. Various no-go results in the literature show that the pair of statements {BKS is valid; dim H greater than or equal to 3} are inconsistent. Here we show, more radically, that the pair actually contradicts the dimensionality of the space itself, by implying that there can exist at most a single one-dimensional projector acting on H. Our derivation involves only elementary inner product spaces. It is non-probabilistic, inequality-free, state independent, does not use entanglement, and is simultaneously valid in all dimensions three or greater.