John Stewart Bell · 1987 (2nd ed. 2004 with Aspect intro) · EPUB · Calibre ID 13286
Resurfaced in The Two Clocks Problem (2026-09-25).
Role in the triad
The oblique edge: a physicist who meets the two-clock structure (egg and alarm clock; option 3, superdeterminism) and refuses it.
Why this book
Bell’s analysis of correlation versus cause restates the occasionalist problem without theology. Casimir’s egg-and-alarm passage in ‘La nouvelle cuisine’ is the two clocks in a kitchen, and Bell’s four attitudes after Aspect map what each book in the triad gives up.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “I want to boil an egg. … Yet the coincidence of these two unrelated causal happenings is meaningful, because, I, the great chef, imposed a structure on my kitchen.” (paper 24, ‘La nouvelle cuisine’, §1, quoting Casimir)
- “But apparently separate parts of the world become deeply entangled, and our apparent free will is entangled with them.” (paper 13)
- “In such ‘superdeterministic’ theories the apparent free will of experimenters, and any other apparent randomness, would be illusory.” (paper 24, §10)
- “In this matter of causality it is a great inconvenience that the real world is given to us once only.” (paper 12)
- “the hands of the clock will have moved, and the moons of Jupiter.” (paper 12)
- “How does the second sock know what the first has done?” (paper 16)
- “Disgrace indeed, to be caught in a metaphysical position!” (paper 12)
Themes
Bell’s theorem · common cause · correlation vs causation · free variables · locality · measurement · superdeterminism