On an attempt to resolve the EPR-Bell paradox via Reichenbachian concept of common cause

Abstract

Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle claims that if there is correlation between two events and none of them is directly causally influenced by the other, then there must exist a third event that can, as a common cause, account for the correlation. The EPR-Bell paradox consists in the problem that we observe correlations between spatially separated events in the EPR-experiments, which do not admit common-cause-type explanation; and it must therefore be inevitably concluded, that, contrary to relativity theory, in the realm of quantum physics there exists action at a distance, or at least superluminal causal propagation is possible; that is, either relativity theory or Reichenbach's common cause principle fails. By means of closer analyses of the concept of common cause and a more precise reformulation of the EPR experimental scenario, I will sharpen the conclusion we can draw from the violation of Bell's inequalities. It will be explicitly shown that the correla-tions we encounter in the EPR experiment could have common causes; that is, Reichen-bach's Common Cause Principle does not fail in quantum mechanics. Moreover, these common causes satisfy the locality conditions usually required. In the Revised Version of the paper I added a Postscript from which it turns out that the solution such obtained is, contrary to the original title, incomplete. It turns out that a new problem arises: some combinations of the common cause events do statistically cor-relate with the measurement operations.