Dr. Bell's paper, “The Theory of Local Beables”, performs a valuable service in clarifying two fundamental concepts: namely, locality and physical reality. His clarification leads him to a fundamental and highly reasonable assumption, expressed in equation (2) of Sect. 2. He then attempts in Sect. 4 to prove inequality (16) as a consequence of his equation (2). Unfortunately, we believe that his proof is not correct. A counter-example shows that (16) does not follow from (2) alone. Our objections are not given in a spirit of skepticism, since (16) does follow from other reasonable assumptions of locality and physical reality. These assumptions were discussed in an earlier paper and will be reconsidered in this letter.

To illustrate the falsity of his claim we consider the following local beable situation. A person concocts a set of correlation experiment data. The data consist of four columns of numbers, indexed by event number j. Two of the columns contain the apparatus parameter settings, aj and bj, while the other two columns contain the experimental results, Aj and Bj. These data have been so contrived as to exhibit the correlation specified by quantum mechanics. The person sends the result columns (Aj and Bj) to an apparatus manufacturer; he sends the apparatus parameter settings to the secretaries of two physicists who will perform a correlation experiment using apparatus supplied by the manufacturer. The manufacturer preprograms the apparatus simply to display in sequence the results Aj (Bj) independently of what parameter setting is employed by physicist 1 (2).