Talk:Quantum nonlocality/GA2

GA Review

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Reviewer: RockMagnetist (talk · contribs) 01:18, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

I am planning to review this article. RockMagnetist(talk) 01:18, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

General comments

I would like to begin by thanking the editors for their efforts on this article. There is a lot of good material, and contrary to the previous review, I don't see any evidence of plagiarism. But I do have some serious concerns.

Writing: context

My first concern comes under the heading of Criterion 1. An important element of good writing is that it provides context for the reader. This article repeatedly fails to do that. Consider the first paragraph of the lead, which mentions local realism, entanglement, local hidden variable theory and Bell's theorem (not to mention quantum and classical physics) without explaining any of them. One might forgive that if the first section in the body explains them, but instead we get a history section that leads off with a mention of a thought experiment and the Copenhagen interpretation, and then starts using ket notation! Any lay leader would be completely lost by this point.

Is it reasonable to expect this article to be written for a lay reader? Definitely! (At least in the first section or two.) This is a subject that is regularly mentioned in popular media, for example a Forbes article, another Forbes article, and a series of articles in Science News.

At a minimum, the first section of the introduction should say a little about the difference between quantum and classical mechanics, describe in lay terms what bothered Einstein about quantum, and explain what local realism and hidden variable theories are (and maybe how action at a distance fits in). And for the most part the bra-ket notation should be dropped; you can use terms like "up" and "down" or "color" like some of the sources below. And it wouldn't hurt to mention Einstein's term "spooky action at a distance" - it would make this article more approachable.

Some sources that might help with making this article more accessible are "The emperor's new mind" by Roger Penrose; "Is the moon there when nobody looks? Reality and the quantum theory" by N. David Mermin; "How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival" by David Kaiser; "The Quantum Handshake: Entanglement, Nonlocality and Transactions" by John G. Cramer; and the Stanford Encyclopedia articles "The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Argument in Quantum Theory" and "Action at a Distance in Quantum Mechanics". Those are just ideas - I won't require you to use them all. RockMagnetist(talk) 01:52, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Experiments

Under Criterion 3, breadth of coverage, a glaring omission is the experiments. They are only discussed in the most cursory fashion. RockMagnetist(talk) 01:52, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Illustrations

It would be nice to have an illustration or two. How about File:Bell-test-photon-analyer.png? RockMagnetist(talk) 01:52, 8 December 2018 (UTC)