An entangled web of crime: Bell’s theorem as a short story

Abstract

Nonlocality of the type first elucidated by Bell in 1964 is a difficult concept to explain to nonspecialists and undergraduates. We attempt to do so by showing how nonlocality can be used to solve a problem in which someone might find themselves as the result of a series of normal, even if somewhat unlikely, events. Our story is told in the style of a Sherlock Holmes mystery, and is based on Mermin's formulation of the "paradoxical" illustration of quantum nonlocality discovered by Greenberger, Horne, and Zeilinger.