Caroline H Thompson

Caroline H. Thompson
Caroline H. Thompson
Born	1943; England
Died	8 February 2006
Residence	Aberaeron, Wales, United Kingdom
Nationality	English
Known for	Critique of EPR and Bell-test experiments, the "chaotic ball" model, the detection loophole
	Scientific career
Fields	Computer science, foundations of physics

Caroline H. Thompson (1943 – 8 February 2006) was an English computer scientist and researcher in the foundations of physics. She is known for her critical re-examination of EPR (Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen) and Bell-test experiments, in which she argued that the reported violations of Bell inequalities do not in fact demonstrate quantum non-locality or "entanglement". To illustrate her position she devised an intuitive analogy known as the "chaotic ball" model and drew attention to what she termed the "detection loophole" in such experiments. Her arguments, which defended a local realist interpretation of quantum phenomena, fall outside the scientific mainstream.

Biography

Early life and education

Thompson was born in England in 1943, the daughter of an airline pilot. Because of the Second World War the family had no permanent home in her early years, moving between RAF bases and living for a time in Baghdad and in Cairo, where she and her elder sister attended a French-speaking school. Back in England she received a conventional education and won a scholarship to the University of Cambridge to read mathematics, graduating with a 2:1. She later described her Cambridge studies as her first exposure to mathematical physics, noting that neither relativity nor quantum theory seemed reasonable to her.

Career

Thompson worked at various times as a teacher and as a systems analyst, producing a simulation program for the air traffic control system around Hong Kong airport. She obtained an MSc in Biometry from the University of Reading and took a post as a statistician at East Malling Research Station, which carries out research on horticultural crops. There she worked within a strict statistical approach to experimental method intended to keep human bias under control.

She married at the age of 32 and had two children, Daniel and Chloe, before moving to Wales, where her father had retired to a small farm. After a period out of academic work she took a training course in information technology and then studied for an MSc in Computer Science at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where her supervisor was Horst Holstein. It was during this period, around 1993, that she encountered accounts of the EPR experiments and began the study of the foundations of physics that occupied the rest of her life. The head of computer science at Aberystwyth, Frank Bott, supported her continued use of the university's library and computing facilities.

Thompson lived in Aberaeron, Wales. She died on 8 February 2006, having fought cancer for several years, and was survived by her husband John and their two children.

Scientific contributions

Thompson devoted the latter part of her life to arguing that the experiments commonly cited as demonstrating quantum "entanglement" and action at a distance had been misinterpreted. She held that a purely statistical theory such as quantum mechanics could not be complete without an underlying, more detailed description of the entities being analysed, and she sought local realist explanations for the observed correlations.

A central element of her argument was the "detection loophole": the observation that when detector efficiencies fall below a certain critical value, the sub-sample of particle pairs that is actually detected need not be representative of the full ensemble, so that a local realist model can reproduce an apparent violation of a Bell inequality. To make this idea accessible to non-specialists she introduced the "chaotic ball" model, an intuitive analogy showing how selection effects and other experimental artifacts could account for the results without invoking non-locality. She also criticised the treatment of timing and "accidental" coincidences in EPR experiments, and questioned the interpretation of landmark experiments such as those of Alain Aspect.

Thompson met and corresponded with a number of researchers who shared realist views, including Trevor Marshall, Emilio Santos, Franco Selleri and Euan Squires. She presented her work at seminars and conferences, including at the University of Bari in Italy and at Durham, and circulated her papers through the arXiv (Los Alamos) preprint archive. While some of her papers appeared in edited volumes and in Foundations of Physics Letters, her submissions to mainstream journals such as Physical Review Letters and Physical Review A were not accepted, and her local realist position remained outside the physics mainstream.

Abstracts

2004 - "Phi-Wave Aether Model"
2000 - "What Really Happens in Those Bell Correlation Experiments?"
1997 - "Behind the Scenes at the EPR Magic Show"
1997 - "Timing, 'Accidentals' and Other Artifacts in EPR Experiments" (Read in full)
1996 - "[[The Chaotic Ball: An Intuitive Analogy for EPR [Einstein-

Podolsky-Rosen] Experiments]]"

External links