Revisiting Bell Tests – Do They Capture True Quantum Reality?

Draft preprint paper abstract: Bell tests have occupied a central role in the interpretation of quantum mechanics for over sixty years, widely regarded as definitive evidence for quantum nonlocality and the impossibility of local hidden-variable theories. We argue that this centrality is methodologically misplaced. Bell test outcome functionals are many-to-one maps that collapse a physically rich quantum state into a single binary value per trial, discarding the overwhelming majority of the physical information and actualities present. Conclusions about quantum reality drawn from such maximally coarse-grained outputs cannot be regarded as definitive descriptions of the underlying ontic state. By contrast, three independent and universal physical constraints — the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (HUP), the thermodynamic requirement of strictly nonzero entropy, and the Bekenstein entropy bound — each mandate irreducible dispersion in every physical process without exception. We propose that these pervasive, filter-free, and theoretically convergent constraints constitute stronger foundational evidence about quantum reality than Bell test statistics, and we examine the implications for the nonlocality interpretation. We do not claim Bell’s theorem is mathematically incorrect; we claim its physical regime is too narrow to support the sweeping ontological conclusions commonly attributed to it.