The Editor

The New Scientist

12:12:99

Dear Sir

Is it possible always to distinguish in practice between "holding to be true" and "believing" as a matter of faith? According to Harold Kirkham (letters, 11 December) the US National Academy of Sciences defines a "fact" as an observation that has been confirmed so many times it is accepted as true. But think about it! On that basis the sun would be considered to move across the sky! No, a "fact" is more than something that has been confirmed. Its truth is quite independent of human opinion.

A case in point - one that is currently causing a quite unnescessary blurring of the boundary between science, magic and faith - is the "belief" that experiments have confirmed the quantum theory prediction of "nonlocal" correlations. Alain Aspect's results of 1981-2 have become, over the course of years, accepted as "gospel truth". The accumulation of many similar results has led to the belief that the evidence for instantaneous influences between particles that have once interacted is now beyond question.

The phenomenon is impossible, but have scientists taken the rational course? Have they investigated thoroughly the various "realist" alternatives that have from time to time been put forward? No! They have kept very quiet about them - about the so-called "loopholes" in the experiments. Could it be that their faith in the universal success of quantum theory simply did not permit them, psychologically, to make a serious challenge?

For it so happens that if Aspect's results are challenged so is the very basis for the theory: the idea that light consists of photons. This whole area is a canker eating into the credibility of fundamental science. It can and must be investigated.

For some ideas (expressed in common sense terms) on exactly how this can be done see <http://www.aber.ac.uk/~cat>. I have studied the "facts" in some detail, from the point of view of a former statistician. The continued success of the quantum theory formulae could well be just the consequence of experimental bias, the subconscious effect of faith!

Caroline H Thompson