Bell Versus Malus - A First-Principles Clash of Models in Quantum Measurement

This work develops a first-principles framework for Bell-test correlations that preserves locality and causality. We show that the observed violations of Bell’s inequality arise naturally from local, deterministic polarization projection governed by Malus’s Law, without invoking non-local influence or quantum entanglement. The analysis fully respects the empirical structure of Bell experiments — spacelike-separated measurement choices, single-photon detection, and reproducible correlations — while exposing how Bell’s binary hidden-variable model fails to capture the continuous, causal nature of polarization interactions. Violations of the inequality are traced not to fundamental non-locality, but to the misapplication of a discrete model to inherently geometric phenomena. Entanglement is reframed as the result of shared causal preparation, not instantaneous influence. Historical context is provided via Louis Pasteur’s 1848 discovery of molecular chirality in polarized light, an early example of measurement as coercive field interaction rather than passive sampling.

Keywords: Bell’s theorem, Malus’s Law, Polarization, Quantum measurement, Local realism, Entanglement, Spacelike separation, Quantum foundations, Deterministic models, Quantum non-locality