Working Through the Contradictions: From Culture Theory to Critical Practice Book

For those, like me, who have been troubled over the decades by violations of Bell inequality, then this is a must read. This is true even if the competence you bring to the book is limited.

Requisites:
For a full critical understanding--which I did not obtain--you should understand calculus to the point of partial derivatives and should also know probability notation. Without this, the gist of arguments can be understood by anyone who does not shy away from symbolic presentations and logic (assuming a very minimal numeracy).

Appendix B, an introduction to quantum mechanics, will give one a sufficient understanding of vector states, and some generalities about classes of operators that affect their evolution (without going into unneeded detail about Hamiltonian operators). For those whose education (but not aptitude) was less numerate, one read won't suffice; I flipped back and re-read selected passages. (It is not however a reference and is never intended to be one.)

The author is a philosophy professor but he avoids having the field's terminology obscure his presentation. If one isn't already familiar with evaluating causation through counterfactuals, one can pick it up contextually. More sophisticated understanding of this and a few other issues are only needed if one wishes to follow the defensive arguments the author mounts against potential attacks from his peers.

Substance:
The author shows quite convincingly that the violations of Bell inequality (and the broader issue that was tersely represented by Bell) create deep problems (although a few claimed problems are dismissed with equal authority). He shows too, illustrated with Bohm's heretical mechanics, that the deep problems plague determinate theories as much as stochastic ones. (Bohm's physics is well presented in a chapter appendix.) Attempts to reconcile the empirical results with special relativity are shown to spin off into wildness, only to be made worse by extension to general relativity. No attempt is made to choose among the purported solutions; rather the author indicates that they lack clear criteria for preference, and hints at the possible inadequacy of the attempted reconciliation.

In the end:
It will not cure one's distress about entanglement operating between space-like-separated events, but one will have a more mature appreciation of the dilemma; this is the best that can be offered today.