Another Missfire at Bell's Inequality

[Adapted from an HBL post] Yet another claimed refutation of Bell's Inequality surfaces here, this one on the part of someone named Joy Christian. Bell's Inequality, together with certain well-confirmed experimental results, demonstrates faster-than-light (in physics parlance, 'non-local') causation in nature, one important feature of quantum mechanics.

However, Christian's conclusions aren't supported in his paper. What he does is to suggest an experiment that is distinct from Bell's and then argue that this experiment can be explained by a local theory. But that doesn't change the fact that Bell's original experiment cannot be explained in such a way.

Christian's experiment involves measuring variables, the Clifford Algebra elements denoted by A_n(mu) in his paper, which are mathematically more complicated than Bell's original ones (simple binary numbers). Christian seems to be equivocating between a change in these measured variables and a change in the "hidden variables" used to define a theory, as if simply defining a new experiment with new variables to measure were somehow equivalent to explaining the original experiment with a new set of hidden variables, i.e. a new proposed theory.

Incidentally, New Scientist has become a meaningless publication insofar as claims of new ideas in physics are concerned.