Quantum entanglement might be a simple statistical illusion caused by how we choose our data.
Bell's Theorem is the foundation of modern physics, claiming that particles stay connected across the universe in a way that defies local reality. This new analysis suggests that selection bias in experiments could be creating the appearance of these correlations where none actually exist. If this math holds up, it would mean the universe is not actually nonlocal and that particles have definite properties even when we aren't looking. This challenge targets the most famous weird part of quantum mechanics and suggests we might have misinterpreted the data for decades. A correction here would force a total rewrite of how we understand the basic building blocks of reality.
Bell Correlations and Selection Bias
arXiv · 2605.00406
Selection artefacts are common in science. A method of selecting samples from a larger population may produce bias, in either direction. It may induce correlations between variables independent in the full population, or mask correlations between variables dependent in the full population. Here we propose a surprising application of these familiar ideas. We argue that they are relevant to puzzling correlations uncovered in quantum theory by John Stewart Bell (Bell 1964). In the light of Bell's w