Abstract:
I'm concerned with our understanding of the consequences of Bell's Theorem and the associated experimental results. In this talk, I will present some ideas about entangled states based on considerations from information theory. Two notions of "separability" emerge. The first of these applies to physical states construed as probability measures, while the second applies to states construed in terms of "elements of physical reality". The former is found to be logically equivalent to the "completeness" constraint (i.e., "outcome independence" or "factorizabilility") in Bell-type arguments. Moreover, it is found that there are theories that are separable in the first sense that are empirically equivalent to no theory that is separable in the second sense. I will offer some speculations about the significance of these and a few related results.