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Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 340

Michael Janas
Michael E. Cuffaro
Michel Janssen

Understanding
Quantum
Raffles
Quantum Mechanics on an
Informational Approach:
Structure and Interpretation
With a Foreword by Jeffrey Bub
Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History
of Science

Volume 340

Editors
Alisa Bokulich, Boston University
Jürgen Renn, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Managing Editor
Lindy Divarci, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Editorial Board
Theodore Arabatzis, University of Athens
Heather E. Douglas, University of Waterloo
Jean Gayon, Université Paris 1
Thomas F. Glick, Boston University
Hubert Goenner, University of Goettingen
John Heilbron, University of California, Berkeley
Diana Kormos-Buchwald, California Institute of Technology
Christoph Lehner, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Peter McLaughlin, Universität Heidelberg
Agustí Nieto-Galan, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Nuccio Ordine, Universitá della Calabria
Sylvan S. Schweber, Harvard University
Ana Simões, Universidade de Lisboa
John J. Stachel, Boston University
Baichun Zhang, Chinese Academy of Science
Kostas Gavroglu, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
The series Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science was
conceived in the broadest framework of interdisciplinary and international
concerns. Natural scientists, mathematicians, social scientists and philoso-
phers have contributed to the series, as have historians and sociologists of
science, linguists, psychologists, physicians, and literary critics.
The series has been able to include works by authors from many other
countries around the world.
The editors believe that the history and philosophy of science should itself
be scientific, self-consciously critical, humane as well as rational, sceptical
and undogmatic while also receptive to discussion of first principles. One of
the aims of Boston Studies, therefore, is to develop collaboration among
scientists, historians and philosophers.
Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science looks into and
reflects on interactions between epistemological and historical dimensions in
an effort to understand the scientific enterprise from every viewpoint.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/5710

Michael Janas • Michael E. Cuffaro
Michel Janssen

Understanding
Quantum Raffles
Quantum Mechanics on an Informational
Approach: Structure and Interpretation

Foreword by Jeffrey Bub

123
Michael Janas Michael E. Cuffaro
School of Physics and Astronomy Fakultät für Philosophie
University of Minnesota Ludwig Maximilian
Minneapolis, MN, USA University of Munich
München, Bayern, Germany
Michel Janssen
School of Physics and Astronomy
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN, USA

ISSN 0068-0346 ISSN 2214-7942 (electronic)

Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science
ISBN 978-3-030-85938-1 ISBN 978-3-030-85939-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85939-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any
other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation,
computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in
this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor
the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material
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neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
We dedicate this volume to the memory of Itamar
Pitowsky (1950–2010) and William Demopoulos
(1943–2017).

In addition, Cuffaro dedicates his efforts to the

memory of Giuseppe, his father (1932–2019)
and Janssen dedicates his efforts to the memory
of Heinrich, his father (1929–2015).
Foreword

Understanding Quantum Raffles was inspired by Bananaworld, as the authors

say, but it is very much more than that. My initial aim in writing Bananaworld
was to de-mystify quantum entanglement for non-physicists—as Schrödinger
remarked, ‘the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces
its entire departure from classical lines of thought.’ I wanted to show that
entanglement is essentially a new sort of nonlocal correlation, explain why
it is puzzling, and point out how it can be used as a resource. The device I
used to exhibit entanglement was the Popescu-Rohrlich nonlocal box, or PR-
box, which I dramatized as a pair of bananas that each acquires one of two
possible tastes when peeled in one of two allowable ways, from the stem end
or the top end. The PR-box correlation is a superquantum correlation but can
be expressed quite simply, without the mathematical machinery of quantum
mechanics. It has all the puzzling features of quantum entanglement and, with
a little poetic license, can even be exploited to show how entanglement works
to enable feats like quantum teleportation, unconditional security in quantum
cryptography, and apparently exponential speed-up in quantum computation.
In spite of the bananas, the book did not turn out to be the sort of thing
you could pick up and enjoy over a beer. So I wrote Totally Random: Why No-
body Understands Quantum Mechanics with my daughter, Tanya Bub. Totally
Random deals with some of the topics discussed in Bananaworld, but in a
way that’s much more accessible and, we hoped, fun to read. We presented the
book as ‘a serious comic on entanglement’—serious because we felt that the
general reader could come away with a real understanding of entanglement:
what it is, what the patriarchs of quantum mechanics have said about it, and
what you can do with it. The authors of Understanding Quantum Raffles—the
three Mikes—have evidently also given a great deal of thought to pedagogical
issues. While some of the discussion, notably Chapter 4, tackles advanced ma-
terial, a major part of the book, especially Chapters 2 and 3, is clearly intended
for the general reader, so if you want to understand what is really new and
interesting about quantum mechanics, this is the book to read.

vii
viii Foreword

In Bananaworld, I brought out the difference between classical and quantum

mechanics by considering to what extent it is possible to simulate a PR-box
correlation with various resources, classical or quantum. Bell’s nonlocality
proof amounts to a demonstration that two separated agents, Alice and Bob,
restricted to classical, and so local resources (effectively what computer scien-
tists call ‘shared randomness’), can achieve an optimal success rate of no more
than 75%. If Alice and Bob are allowed to use quantum resources, entangled
pairs of photons or electrons, they can do better, about 85%. Equipped with
PR-boxes, they can, of course, achieve a 100% success rate. Another way to
put this is in terms of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) inequality
for two bivalent Alice-observables and two bivalent Bob-observables. The
CHSH correlation for the four pairs of observables is constrained √ to √
values
between −2 and 2 for local classical correlations, between −2 2 and 2 2 for
quantum correlations, and between −4 and 4 for PR-box correlations, which
are maximal for correlations that do not allow instantaneous signaling. Ge-
ometrically, as Pitowsky showed,1 the classical or local correlations for this
case can be represented by the points in an 8-dimensional polytope with facets
characterized by the CHSH inequality and similar inequalities, the quantum
correlations by the points in a convex set that includes the polytope, and the
no-signaling correlations by a polytope that includes the quantum convex set.
The three Mikes do something brilliantly different. Instead of the CHSH
inequality, they consider the Mermin inequality for three bivalent observables
for each agent. In terms of bananas, Alice and Bob peel their bananas in
one of three possible ways associated with three directions in which they
are required to hold their bananas while peeling. This complication, which
I blush to admit I first thought was pointless, results in a tetrahedron for
the classical or local correlations, an elliptope for the quantum convex set (a
‘fat’ tetrahedron that includes the classical tetrahedron), and a cube for the
no-signaling correlations—easily visualizable in three dimensions. The three
Mikes produce two derivations for the non-linear inequality characterizing
the elliptope: a derivation ‘from within’ quantum mechanics, which uses the
Born rule for probabilities, and a derivation ‘from without,’ which follows
work by Yule in the late 19th century on Pearson correlation coefficients. In
Yule’s derivation, the inequality is a general constraint on correlations between
three random variables. In the ‘proof from without,’ the random variables are
the eigenvalues of Hilbert space operators representing observables and the

1 I. Pitowsky, ‘On the geometry of quantum correlations,’ Physical Review A 77, 062109
(2008).
Foreword ix

constraint follows quite generally, without assuming the Born rule for quantum
probabilities.
The Mermin inequality refers to spin-1/2 particles in the singlet state.
Remarkably, it turns out that singlet state quantum correlations are confined
to the elliptope even for higher spin values, while the tetrahedron for local
classical correlations is replaced by a succession of polyhedra with more and
more facets for higher spins, approaching the elliptope in the limit of infinite
spin. All this is beautifully illustrated in 3-dimensional visualizations. The
analysis is particularly impressive because it shows clearly and precisely how
classical and quantum correlations are related in this particular case.
This is certainly the first book in which the word ‘Bubism’ appears. The
three Mikes use the term to refer to ‘an interpretation of quantum mechanics
along the lines of Bananaworld, belonging to the same lineage, or so we will
argue, as the much-maligned Copenhagen interpretation.’ Bananaworld began
as a discussion of entanglement, but as I wrote the book it evolved into a way
of thinking about the transition from classical to quantum mechanics. The
three Mikes have taken this perspective and articulated and developed it into
an interpretation that I fully endorse but which owes as much to their careful
analysis of the conceptual issues as my own thinking.
I added the last chapter to Bananaworld, ‘Making Sense of it All,’ because
I thought I should say something about the measurement problem of quantum
mechanics as it is usually understood, and how various interpretations propose
to solve the problem. But the chapter doesn’t fit well with the rest of the book,
which, taken as a whole, was already an attempt to make sense of it all. The
revised version in the paperback edition is an improvement, but not entirely
satisfactory. Chapter 6 of Understanding Quantum Raffles, on interpreting
quantum mechanics, nails it.
Here, following the account by the three Mikes, is how I now see the view
they call Bubism. Quantum mechanics began with Heisenberg’s unprecedented
move to ‘reinterpret’ classical quantities like position and momentum as non-
commutative. In a commutative algebra, the 2-valued quantities, representing
propositions that can be true or false, form a Boolean algebra. A Boolean
algebra is isomorphic to a set of subsets of a set, with the Boolean opera-
tions corresponding to the union, intersection, and complement of sets. The
conceptual significance of Heisenberg’s proposal lies in replacing the Boolean
algebra of subsets of classical phase space, where the points represent classical
states and subsets represent ranges of values of dynamical variables, with a
non-Boolean algebra. Later, following the Born-Heisenberg-Jordan Dreimän-
nerarbeit and further developments by Dirac, Jordan, and von Neumann, this
x Foreword

non-Boolean algebra was formalized as the algebra of closed subspaces of

Hilbert space, a vector space over the complex numbers, or equivalently a
projective geometry. So the transition from classical to quantum mechanics
is, formally, the transition from a Boolean algebra of subsets of a set to a
non-Boolean algebra of subspaces of a vector space.
In his 1862 work ‘On the Theory of Probabilities,’ George Boole charac-
terized a Boolean algebra as capturing ‘the conditions of possible experience.’
Classical theories are Boolean theories. The non-Boolean algebra of quantum
mechanics (for Hilbert spaces of more than two dimensions) can be pictured as
a family of Boolean algebras that are ‘intertwined,’ to use Gleason’s term,2 or
‘pasted together,’ in such a way that the whole family can’t be embedded into
a single Boolean algebra.3 So in a quantum theory, the single Boolean algebra
of a classical theory is replaced by a family of Boolean algebras, in effect, a
family of Boolean perspectives or Boolean frames associated with different
incompatible measurement experiences. The upshot, as von Neumann pointed
out, is that quantum probabilities are ‘perfectly new and sui generis aspects of
physical reality’4 and ‘uniquely given from the start.’
The sense in which quantum probabilities are ‘uniquely given from the
start’ is explained in an address by von Neumann on ‘unsolved problems in
mathematics’ to an international congress of mathematicians in Amsterdam,
September 2–9, 1954.5 Here is the relevant passage:

2 A. N. Gleason, ‘Measures on the closed subspaces of Hilbert space,’ Journal of Mathemat-

ics and Mechanics 6, 885–893 (1957). The term is used to refer to intertwined orthonormal
sets, which are Boolean algebras, on p. 886.
3 Kochen and Specker proved non-embeddability for the ‘partial Boolean algebra’ of sub-
spaces of a Hilbert space of more than two dimensions in S. Kochen and E.P. Specker,
‘On the problem of hidden variables in quantum mechanics,’ Journal of Mathematics and
Mechanics 17, 59–87 (1967). Bell proved a related result as a corollary to Gleason’s theorem
in J.S. Bell, ‘On the problem of hidden variables in quantum mechanics,’ Reviews of Modern
Physics 38, 447–452 (1966), reprinted in J.S. Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum
Mechanics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987).
4 From an unpublished manuscript ‘Quantum logics (strict- and probability-logics),’ re-
viewed in A.H. Taub in John von Neumann: Collected Works (Macmillan, New York, 1962),
volume 4, pp. 195–197.
5 In Miklós Rédei and Michael Stöltzner (eds.), John von Neumann and the Foundations
of Quantum Mechanics, pp. 231–246 (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2001). The
quoted passage is on pp. 244–245. Also quoted (without the last sentence) in M. Rédei, “‘Un-
solved Problems in Mathematics’ J. von Neumann’s address to the International Congress
of Mathematicians Amsterdam, September 2–9, 1954,’ The Mathematical Intelligencer 21,
7–12 (1999).
Foreword xi

Essentially if a state of a system is given by one vector, the transition probability

in another state is the inner product of the two which is the square of the cosine of
the angle between them [sic].6 In other words, probability corresponds precisely to
introducing the angles geometrically. Furthermore, there is only one way to introduce
it. The more so because in the quantum mechanical machinery the negation of
a statement, so the negation of a statement which is represented by a linear set
of vectors, corresponds to the orthogonal complement of this linear space. And
therefore, as soon as you have introduced into the projective geometry the ordinary
machinery of logics, you must have introduced the concept of orthogonality. This
actually is rigorously true and any axiomatic elaboration of the subject bears it out.
So in order to have logics you need in this set a projective geometry with a concept
of orthogonality in it.
In order to have probability all you need is a concept of all angles, I mean angles
other than 90◦ . Now it is perfectly quite true that in geometry, as soon as you can
define the right angle, you can define all angles. Another way to put it is that if you
take the case of an orthogonal space, those mappings of this space on itself, which
leave orthogonality intact, leave all angles intact, in other words, in those systems
which can be used as models of the logical background for quantum theory, it is true
that as soon as all the ordinary concepts of logic are fixed under some isomorphic
transformation, all of probability theory is already fixed.
What I now say is not more profound than saying that the concept of a priori
probability in quantum mechanics is uniquely given from the start.

In Bananaworld, I defended what I called an ‘information-theoretic’ inter-

pretation of quantum mechanics. The term is perhaps unfortunate. In the first
place, it invites objections like those by Bell: ‘Whose information? Informa-
tion about what?’7 In the second place, the emphasis should be on probability,
as the three Mikes make clear, with the understanding that information the-
ory is a branch of probability theory specifically concerned with probabilistic
correlations.
If relativity is about space and time, quantum mechanics is about proba-
bility, in the sense that quantum probabilities are ‘sui generis’ and ‘uniquely
given from the start’ as an aspect of the kinematic structure of the theory and
are not imposed from outside as a measure of ignorance, as in classical theo-
ries, where probability is a measure over phase space. In this new framework,
new sorts of nonlocal probabilistic correlations associated with entanglement
are possible, which makes quantum information fundamentally different from

6 Von Neumann evidently meant to say that the transition probability is the square of the
(absolute value of) the inner product, which is the square of the cosine of the angle between
them.
7 J.S. Bell, ‘Against measurement,’ in Physics World 8, 33–40 (1990). The comment is on
p. 34.
xii Foreword

classical information. In a Boolean theory such correlations are impossible

without introducing what Einstein called ‘spooky’ action at a distance.
Quantum probabilities are revealed in measurement, and a measurement is
associated with the selection of a particular Boolean frame in the family of
Boolean algebras that ‘captures the conditions of possible experience.’ In terms
of observables, a measurement involves the selection of a basis of commuting
observables in Hilbert space. As a consequence, the observer is no longer
‘detached,’ unlike the observer in classical mechanics, as Pauli observed.8 The
measurement outcome is a random assignment of truth values to the elements
in the Boolean frame, or a random assignment of values to the observables
in the corresponding basis. What’s puzzling, from a Boolean perspective, is
that measurement in a non-Boolean theory is not passive—not just ‘looking’
and registering what’s there in a passive sense. Measurement must produce
a change in the description, and that’s not how we are used to thinking of
measurement in a Boolean theory. Here’s how Schrödinger puts it:9
(1) The discontinuity of the expectation-catalog [the quantum pure state] due to
measurement is unavoidable, for if measurement is to retain any meaning at all then
the measured value, from a good measurement, must obtain. (2) The discontinuous
change is certainly not governed by the otherwise valid causal law, since it depends
on the measured value, which is not predetermined. (3) The change also definitely
includes (because of ‘maximality’ [the ‘completeness’ of the quantum pure state])
some loss of knowledge, but knowledge cannot be lost, and so the object must
change—both along with the discontinuous changes and also, during these changes,
in an unforeseen, different way.

Quantum probabilities don’t simply represent ignorance about what is the

case. Rather, they represent a new sort of ignorance about something that
doesn’t yet have a truth value, something that simply isn’t one way or the other
before we measure, something that requires us to act and do something that we
call a measurement before nature supplies a truth value—and removes the truth
values of incompatible propositions that don’t belong to the same Boolean
frame, associated with observables that don’t commute with the measured
observable.

8 M. Born, The Born-Einstein Correspondence (Walker and Co., London, 1971). Pauli talks
about the classical ideal of the ‘detached observer’ in a letter to Born dated March 30, 1954
on p. 218.
9 ‘Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik,’ Die Naturwissenschaften 48, 807–
812; 49, 823–828, 844–849 (1935). The quotation is from p. 826. The translation is by John
Trimmer, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124, 323—338 (1980).
Foreword xiii

Schrödinger calls the measurement problem ‘the most difficult and most
interesting point of the theory.’10 As the three Mikes aptly put it, the measure-
ment problem is a feature of quantum mechanics as a non-Boolean theory, not
a bug.
Interpretations of quantum mechanics that oppose the Copenhagen inter-
pretation begin with Schrödinger’s wave theory as conceptually fundamental,
rather than Heisenberg’s algebraic formulation of quantum mechanics, and
propose dynamical solutions to what then seems to be a problem: how does
what we do when we perform a measurement by manipulating some hardware
in a laboratory select a Boolean frame in Hilbert space, a basis of observables
that have definite values, and what explains the particular assignment of truth
values to the elements in the Boolean frame, or the particular assignment of
values to observables.
Bohm’s theory tells a one-world Boolean story: position in configuration
space is always definite, associated with a Boolean algebra, and other quan-
tities become definite through correlation with position via the measurement
dynamics. The problem here, as Bell showed, is that Bohm’s theory is nonlo-
cal in configuration space, allowing instantaneous action at a distance, which
Einstein regarded as ‘spooky’11 and so non-physical (although averaging over
the Born distribution hides the nonlocality). I suspect that it was for this rea-
son that Einstein dismissed Bohm’s theory as ‘too cheap for me’ in a letter to
Born.12
The Everett interpretation tells a multi-world Boolean story in which every-
thing that can happen does happen in some Boolean world. This avoids having
to explain why this measurement outcome rather than that measurement out-
come, since every possible outcome actually occurs in some world. The trick is
to show how this fits Schrödinger’s wave theory of quantum mechanics. There
is no spooky action at a distance in the Everettian interpretation, but the mea-
surement problem appears as the basis problem: how to explain the selection of
a particular basis with respect to which the multiplicity associated with ‘split-
ting into many worlds’ occurs in a measurement process. Everettians solve the
basis problem by appealing to the dynamics of environmental decoherence:
as the environment becomes increasingly entangled with the measuring ap-

10 ibid., p. 826.
11 M. Born, op. cit.. The term is used in a letter from Einstein to Born dated March 3, 1947
on p. 158.
12 M. Born, op. cit. The comment is on p. 192 in a letter from Einstein to Born dated May
12, 1952.
xiv Foreword

paratus, it becomes more and more difficult, but not in principle impossible,
to distinguish an entangled state from the corresponding mixture with respect
to a particular coarse-grained basis. Quantum probabilities with respect to
the elements of this basis are explained in terms of the decision theory of an
agent-in-a-world about to make a measurement. Even granting decoherence as
an effective solution to the basis problem, it seems contrived to interpret the
‘perfectly new and sui generis aspects of physical reality,’ the Hilbert space
probabilities that are ‘uniquely given from the start,’ in this way.
Understanding Quantum Raffles is likely to be a classic in the foundational
literature on quantum mechanics. The three Mikes have produced an exception-
ally lucid book on quantum foundations that is also suitable for readers, with
some tolerance for basic algebra and geometry, who are looking for answers
to conceptual questions that are typically glossed over in standard courses on
quantum mechanics.

Jeffrey Bub
Philosophy Department
Institute for Physical Science and Technology
Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science
University of Maryland, College Park
Preface

The volume you just got yourself entangled with was inspired by Jeffrey Bub’s
(2016) Bananaworld: Quantum Mechanics for Primates. Our original plan
had been to contribute an article to a special issue of the journal Studies in
History and Philosophy of Modern Physics devoted to Jeff’s book. That article
eventually grew and morphed into this monograph, which we feel can now
stand on its own feet. We are proud to present it as a volume in the series
Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science. In this volume,
on the basis of some novel technical results (Chapters 2–5), we present and
defend an informational interpretation of the basic framework of quantum
mechanics (Chapters 1, 6–7). Our primary target audience for this book is
physicists, philosophers of physics and students in these areas interested in
the foundations of quantum mechanics. However, in the spirit of Bananaworld
and its sequel, the graphic novel Totally Random: Why Nobody Understands
Quantum Mechanics written by Jeff and his daughter Tanya (Bub & Bub,
2018), we wrote parts of our book (especially Chapter 2 and Sections 3.1–3.2)
with the idea that they could be used as the basis for courses introducing
non-physics majors to quantum mechanics, or for self-study by those outside
of a university setting with an interest in quantum mechanics. Such readers,
however, should be prepared to brush up on some high-school mathematics
along the way (basic algebra and geometry; sines and cosines; vectors, matrices
and determinants—but absolutely no calculus).13 We hope that all readers,
even those who disagree with us on the basic issue of how their entanglement
with our book results in them forming a definite view of its contents, will find
something of value between its covers. This preface serves two purposes. First,
we will briefly describe the contents of this volume. Second, we will give a
brief history of how we came to write it, which will also give us an opportunity
to thank the many people who helped us along the way.
Let us begin then by laying out the overall argumentative strategy of our
book (which is in broad outline the same as it was in our original plan for a
paper). We use correlation arrays, the workhorse of Bananaworld, to analyze
the correlations found in an experimental setup due to David Mermin (1981)
for measurements on pairs of spin- 21 particles in the singlet state. Adopting
an approach pioneered by Itamar Pitowsky (1989b) and promoted in Banana-
13 See Section 2.6.2, note 28, for some recommendations for non-expert readers looking for
introductions to the basic formalism of quantum mechanics.

xv
xvi Preface

world, we geometrically represent the class of correlations allowed by quantum

mechanics in this setup as an elliptope in a non-signaling cube, which repre-
sents the broader class of all correlations that cannot be used for the purpose
of sending signals traveling faster than the speed of light. To determine which
of these quantum correlations are allowed by so-called local hidden-variable
theories, we investigate which ones we can simulate using raffles with baskets
of tickets that have the outcomes for all combinations of measurement settings
printed on them. The class of correlations found this way can be represented
geometrically by a tetrahedron contained within the elliptope. We use the same
Bub-Pitowsky framework to analyze a generalization of the Mermin setup for
measurements on pairs of particles with higher spin in the singlet state. The
class of correlations allowed by quantum mechanics in this case is still rep-
resented by the elliptope; the subclass of those whose main features can be
simulated with our raffles can be represented by polyhedra that, with increas-
ing spin, have more and more vertices and facets and get closer and closer to
the elliptope.
We use these results to advocate for Bubism (not to be confused with
QBism), an interpretation of quantum mechanics along the lines of Banana-
world, belonging to the same lineage, or so we will argue, as the much-maligned
Copenhagen interpretation. Probabilities and expectation values are primary
in this interpretation. They are determined by inner products of state vectors
in Hilbert space. State vectors do not themselves represent what is real in
quantum mechanics. Instead the state vector gives a family of probability dis-
tributions over the values of subsets of observables, which do not add up to one
overarching joint probability distribution over the values of all observables.
As in classical theory, these values (along with the values of non-dynamical
quantities such as charge or spin) represent what is real in the quantum world.
Hilbert space puts constraints on possible combinations of such values, just as
Minkowski space-time puts constraints on possible spatio-temporal constella-
tions of events. To illustrate how generic such constraints are, we show that
the one derived in this volume, the elliptope inequality, is a general constraint
on correlation coefficients, which can already be found in much older litera-
ture on statistics and probability theory. Udny Yule (1897) already stated the
constraint. Bruno de Finetti (1937) already gave it a geometrical interpretation
sharing important features with its interpretation in Hilbert space.
As this brief synopsis shows, polytopes and philosophy form two pillars of
this volume. The third pillar is pedagogy. As noted above, we wrote parts of this
volume as an introduction to quantum mechanics for non-specialists. For many
years, one of us (Janssen) used a combination of the paper by Mermin (1981)
Preface xvii

mentioned above and chapters from David Albert’s Quantum Mechanics and
Experience (Albert, 1992) to introduce quantum mechanics to non-physics
majors in college and in high-school physics classes. Over the past few years,
Janssen (assisted by Janas) has been developing a different approach, informed
by and informing the material presented in this book. Like Albert (1992, Ch.
1, pp. 1–16, “Superposition”), we start, in Chapter 2, with certain stochastic
experiments and show that classical theory (more precisely: local hidden-
variable theories) cannot account for the statistics found in these experiments.
Following Mermin rather than Albert, however, we choose (variations on) an
experiment highlighting entanglement rather than superposition as the key
feature that distinguishes quantum theory from classical theory (cf. Chapter
2, note 2 and Chapter 6, note 44). Albert (1992, Ch. 2, pp. 17–60) proceeds
to give a concise and elementary exposition of the formalism of quantum
mechanics (which we highly recommend to readers unfamiliar with it) and
shows how it can account for the puzzling statistics presented in the opening
chapter of his book. Yet it remains unclear how anybody would come up
with this way of accounting for these puzzling statistics in the first place.
Bub’s Bananaworld, especially the notion of correlation arrays, allows us to
do better. The correlation arrays for the puzzling statistics we start from can be
parametrized by the sines and cosines of certain angles. In quantum mechanics
such sines and cosines naturally emerge as components of vectors in various
bases in what is called a Hilbert space. In Section 2.6, we introduce just enough
formalism to get this basic idea across to non-specialists. More rigorous and
more general versions of the arguments in Chapter 2 will be given in Chapter
4, which the reader can skip or skim (along with Chapter 5) without losing the
thread of the overall argument (but we hope the reader will at least take a look
at the pictures of correlation polyhedra in Figures 4.11, 4.13 and 4.17). The
connection between quantum mechanics and general statistics and probability
theory will be explored further in Chapter 3, also accessible to non-specialists
with the exception of the later parts of Section 3.4. The upshot of Chapters
2–5 is summarized at the beginning of Chapter 6, making that chapter largely
self-contained and thus suitable, all by itself, for courses on the foundations of
quantum mechanics.
Polytopes, philosophy and pedagogy are the main interests of Janas, Cuf-
faro and Janssen, respectively. Accordingly, even though all three of us made
substantial contributions to all seven chapters, Janssen had final responsibil-
ity for Chapters 1–2, Janas for Chapters 3–5 and Cuffaro for Chapters 6–7.
The three of us came to this project from different directions. Janssen, a his-
torian of science, is a recovering Everettian who has been defending Bub’s
xviii Preface

information-theoretic interpretation with the zeal of the converted. Cuffaro, a

philosopher of science, was and is mainly interested in quantum computation
and information, but began to think seriously again about the interpretation of
quantum mechanics through conversations with Bill Demopoulos before meet-
ing Janssen in 2017. Janas, a theoretical physicist, was and remains a Bohm
sympathizer. Though we each have our own unique interests and histories, one
thing the three of us share is a broadly Kantian outlook, something careful
readers familiar with that outlook will not fail to notice as they go through the
pages of this volume.
This project started in the Fall of 2016 when, at Janssen’s suggestion,
the Physics Interest Group (PIG) of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of
Science of the University of Minnesota, devoted most of its biweekly meetings
that semester to Bananaworld. This book rekindled Janssen’s interest in Bub
and Pitowsky’s heretical contribution to the Everett@50 conference in Oxford
in 2007, “Two dogmas about quantum mechanics” (Bub & Pitowsky, 2010).
In these PIG sessions, Janssen presented his reworking of Mermin’s setup
for testing a Bell inequality in terms of Bub’s correlation arrays along with
a (clumsy) derivation of the so-called Tsirelson bound for this setup. Janas
attended these sessions. On a return visit to Bananaworld in the Fall of 2017,
Janas began to explore the geometrical representation of correlation arrays by
polyhedra and polytopes. He thereupon joined Janssen and Cuffaro, who, at the
2017 edition of the conference New Directions in the Foundations of Physics
in Tarquinia, had decided to write a response to Bananaworld together. In the
Fall of 2017, Janssen gave a physics colloquium at Minnesota State University
Mankato on our joint project, and then a lunchtime talk at the Center for
Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh in the Spring of 2018.
By that time Laurent Taudin, illustrator extraordinaire for many projects of
the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, had drawn the
figures of the chimps and the bananas that we have been using in talks and
lectures since (see Figures 2.1 and 2.2).
After extensive preparatory work by Janas and Janssen in the Fall of 2018,
we started writing what would eventually become this book during a visit by
Cuffaro to Minnesota in January 2019. In March, Cuffaro presented a prelim-
inary version of parts of Chapters 2, 3 and 6 at the Workshop on Interpreting
Quantum Mechanics organized by Giovanni Valente at the Politecnico di Mi-
lano in Milan. In May, after a test run by Janas in a mathematics colloquium
at the University of Minnesota, the three of us then presented parts of these
same chapters at the 2019 edition of New Directions in the Foundations of
Physics in Viterbo. A question for Janas by Wayne Myrvold in Q&A alerted
Preface xix

us to an important gap in one of our key results, which we have since managed
to close (see Chapter 3, notes 10 and 11). In June 2019 the three of us met
again in Minneapolis. Over the ensuing months we finalized (or so we thought)
our manuscript and in October we posted it on the arXiv and on the PhilSci
Archive preprint servers. By that time Janas had filled several whiteboards
in Tate Hall, housing part of the School of Physics and Astronomy of the
University of Minnesota, many times over to go over (preliminary versions
of) the results presented in Chapters 2–5 with Janssen and, when in town,
Cuffaro. Janas also did the computer programming needed for Section 4.2 and
for Figures 2.8 and 2.16. Janssen is responsible for most other figures. Cuffaro
handled whatever LATEX issues we ran into.
Janssen gave two talks on parts of our preprint at the Second Chilean Con-
ference on the Philosophy of Physics organized by Pablo Acuña in Santiago in
December 2019, where he had the opportunity to discuss the material in person
with Jeff Bub. A slightly revised version of our preprint was then pre-circulated
among participants in a symposium on the foundations of quantum mechanics
organized by Janssen, Jürgen Jost and Jürgen Renn at the Max-Planck-Institut
für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin in January 2020. In this symposium,
Cuffaro and Janssen presented parts of what was starting to get referred to as
the “Three Mikes Manifesto,” a play on the famous Dreimännerarbeit (Three
men paper) with which Max Born, Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan
(1926) consolidated matrix mechanics. Based on feedback from the partici-
pants in this symposium (especially Guido Bacciagaluppi, Jürgen Jost, Jürgen
Renn and Matthias Schemmel) and from others who had read our preprint,
we added further material to Chapter 5 and substantially rewrote Chapters 1
and 6 (especially Section 6.5 on measurement). We also changed the title. The
title of our preprint, “Putting probabilities first: How Hilbert space generates
and constrains them,” would have been fine for a journal article in a special
issue devoted to Bananaworld. It would have been obvious, for instance, in
that context that our topic is quantum mechanics even though the title does
not explicitly mention this. Given the use of Hilbert space methods in general
probability theory and statistics, however, this would not have been clear for
a monograph with that same title. We settled on the new title Understanding
Quantum Raffles. Raffles of various designs are ubiquitous in this volume.
And while we are hardly the first to argue that the basic formalism of quan-
tum mechanics is essentially a new framework for handling probabilities (cf.
Chapter 1, notes 16 and 29), we are the first to do so on the basis of a sustained
comparison between raffles serving as toy models of local hidden-variable the-
ories and the statistical ensembles characterized by density operators in terms
xx Preface

of which John von Neumann (inspired by Richard von Mises) first formulated
quantum mechanics (Von Neumann, 1927b). The “quantum raffles” in the title
of our book refer to these statistical ensembles introduced by von Neumann.
In the Fall of 2020, after trying out some of the material in Chapter 2
in classes at the University of Minnesota and Washburn High School in Min-
neapolis, Janssen, assisted by Janas, taught a seminar in the Honors Program of
the University of Minnesota under the title of Gilder’s (2008) The Age of Entan-
glement, covering—in addition to Gilder’s book and the graphic novel Totally
Random by Tanya and Jeff Bub (2018)—Chapters 1–3 of the manuscript of Un-
derstanding Quantum Raffles. In response to student feedback, we reorganized
some of the material in Chapters 2 and 3.
We are grateful for the questions from the audiences at the various work-
shops and talks mentioned above as well as for the feedback from students at
the University of Minnesota and Washburn High School. In addition, we want
to single out a number of individuals not explicitly mentioned so far and thank
them for helpful comments and discussion: Jossi Berkovitz, Victor Boantza,
Harvey Brown, Časlav Brukner, Adán Cabello, Joe Cain, Cindy Cattell, Radin
Dardashti, Michael Dascal, Robert DiSalle, Tony Duncan, Lucas Dunlap,
Laura Felline, Sam Fletcher, Mathias Frisch, Chris Fuchs, Louisa Gilder, Sona
Ghosh, Peter Gilbertson, Peter Grul, Bill Harper, Stephan Hartmann, Geof-
frey Hellman, Leah Henderson, Federico Holik, Luc Janssen, Christian Joas,
Molly Kao, David Kaiser, Jim Kakalios, Alex Kamenev, Jed Kaniewski, Mar-
ius Krumm, Femke Kuiling, Samo Kutoš, Christoph Lehner, Charles Marcus,
Tushar Menon, Eran Moore Rea, Markus Müller, Max Niedermaier, Sergio Per-
nice, Vincent Pikavet, Serge Rudaz, David Russell, Rob “Ryno” Rynasiewicz,
Juha Saatsi, Ryan Samaroo, Chris Smeenk, Rob Spekkens, Jos Uffink, David
Wallace and Brian Woodcock. We thank Lindy Divarci, Jürgen Renn and
Matteo Valleriani of the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte for
their help in turning our manuscript into a book. We thank an anonymous
referee who reviewed our book for Springer both for the enthusiastic endorse-
ment and for helpful comments. We thank Lucy Fleet, Prasad Gurunadham
and Svetlana Kleiner at Springer for shepherding our manuscript through the
production process.
We saved our most important intellectual debts for last. A heartfelt thanks
to Jeff Bub for his enthusiastic support of our efforts and for his patience in
explaining and discussing his views on the foundations of quantum mechanics
with us, both in person and in email exchanges dating back to 2007. We are also
grateful for all we learned from Itamar Pitowsky (1950–2010) and William
Preface xxi

Demopoulos (1943–2017). Instead of dedicating this volume to them, we

would have loved to discuss it with Bill and Itamar.
Finally, we want to express our thanks for generous institutional support.
Janssen gratefully acknowledges support from the Alexander von Humboldt
Stiftung and the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Cuffaro
gratefully acknowledges support from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung,
the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University, the Foundational
Questions Institute (FQXi), the Descartes Centre at Utrecht University, and
the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna. Janas
thanks the University of Minnesota for travel support as well as the staff of
Al’s Breakfast in Dinkytown.

Lino Lakes, MN, USA Michael Janas

Montréal, Québec, Canada Mike Cuffaro
Minneapolis, MN, USA Michel Janssen
March 2021
Contents

1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2 Representing distant correlations by correlation arrays and

polytopes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.1 Taking Mermin to Bananaworld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.2 Correlations found when peeling and tasting pairs of
quantum bananas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2.3 Non-signaling correlation arrays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.4 The non-signaling cube, the classical tetrahedron and the
quantum elliptope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.5 Raffles meant to simulate the quantum correlations and the
classical tetrahedron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.6 The quantum correlations and the elliptope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
2.6.1 Getting beyond the classical tetrahedron: the
elliptope inequality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.6.2 The quantum correlation array: the singlet state and
the Born rule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

3 The elliptope and the geometry of correlations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

3.1 The Pearson correlation coefficient and the elliptope inequality 67
3.2 Why the quantum correlations saturate the elliptope . . . . . . . . . 71
3.3 Why our raffles do not saturate the elliptope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
3.4 The geometry of correlations: from Pearson and Yule to
Fisher and De Finetti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

4 Generalization to singlet state of two particles with higher spin . 103

4.1 The quantum correlations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
4.1.1 Quantum formalism for one spin-s particle . . . . . . . . . . 107
4.1.2 Quantum formalism for two spin-s particles in the
singlet state . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
4.1.3 Wigner d-matrices and correlation arrays in the
spin-s case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
4.1.4 Non-signaling in the spin-s case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
4.1.5 Anti-correlation coefficients in the spin-s case . . . . . . . 119
4.1.6 Cell symmetries in the spin-s case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
4.2 Designing raffles to simulate the quantum correlations . . . . . . . 125

xxiii
xxiv Contents

4.2.1 Spin- 21 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

4.2.2 Spin-1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
4.2.3 Spin- 32 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
4.2.4 Spin-s (s ≥ 2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149

5 Correlation arrays, polytopes and the CHSH inequality . . . . . . . 157

6 Interpreting quantum mechanics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

6.1 The story so far . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
6.2 From within and from without . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
6.3 The new kinematics of quantum theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
6.4 Examples of problems solved by the new kinematics . . . . . . . . 187
6.5 Measurement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194

7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
Chapter 1
Introduction

Genealogy of interpretations of quantum mechanics • Informational interpretations: ob-

jections (parochialism and anti-realism) and rejoinders • Bub and Pitowsky’s “big” and
“small” measurement problems: puzzles to be solved or lessons to be learned? • Bub’s
correlation arrays and Pitowsky’s correlation polytopes for Mermin’s setup to test a Bell
inequality • Quantum mechanics as a general framework for handling probabilities.

This volume is a brief for a specific take on the general framework of quantum
mechanics. In terms of the usual partisan labels, it is an informational interpre-
tation in which the status of the state vector is epistemic rather than ontic. On
the ontic view, state vectors represent what is ultimately real in the quantum
world; on the epistemic view, they are auxiliary quantities for assigning prob-
abilities to values of observables in a world in which it is impossible to do so
simultaneously for all observables. Such labels, however, are of limited use for
a classification of interpretations of quantum mechanics. A more promising
approach might be to construct a genealogy.1 As this is not a historical work,
a rough characterization of the relevant phylogenetic tree must suffice for our
purposes.2

1 The contemporary literature on quantum foundations has muddied the waters in regards to
the classification of interpretations of quantum mechanics, and it is partly for this reason that
we prefer to give a taxonomy in terms of a genealogy. Ours is not an epistemic interpretation
of quantum mechanics in the sense compatible with the ontological models framework of
Harrigan & Spekkens (2010). In particular it is not among our assumptions that a quantum
system has, at any time, a well-defined ontic state. Actually we take one of the lessons of
quantum mechanics to be that this view is untenable (see Section 6.3 below). For more on the
differences between a view such as ours and the kind of epistemic interpretation explicated
in Harrigan & Spekkens (2010), and for more on why the no-go theorem proved by Pusey,
Barrett, & Rudolph (2012) places restrictions on the latter kind of epistemic interpretation
but is at most only indirectly relevant to ours, see Ben-Menahem (2017).
2 One of us is working on a two-volume book on the genesis of quantum mechanics. The
first volume has already been published (Duncan & Janssen, 2019).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 1

M. Janas et al., Understanding Quantum Raffles, Boston Studies in the Philosophy
and History of Science 340, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85939-8_1
2 1 Introduction

The main thing to note then is that the mathematical equivalence of wave and
matrix mechanics papers over a key difference in what its originators thought
their big discoveries were.3 These big discoveries are certainly compatible with
one another but there is at least a striking difference in emphasis. For Erwin
Schrödinger the big discovery was that a wave phenomenon underlies the parti-
cle behavior of matter, just as physicists in the 19th century had discovered that
a wave phenomenon underlies geometrical optics (Joas & Lehner, 2009). For
Werner Heisenberg it was that the problems facing atomic physics in the 1920s
call for a new framework to represent physical quantities just as electrodynam-
ics had called for a new framework to represent their spatio-temporal relations
two decades earlier (Duncan & Janssen, 2007, Janssen, 2019, pp. 134–142).4
What are now labeled ontic interpretations—e.g., Everett’s many-worlds inter-
pretation, De Broglie-Bohm pilot-wave theory and the spontaneous-collapse
theory of Ghirardi, Rimini and Weber (GRW)—can be seen as descendants
of wave mechanics; what are now labeled epistemic interpretations—e.g.,
the much maligned Copenhagen interpretation5 and Quantum Bayesianism or
QBism—as descendants of matrix mechanics.6

3 As Bacciagaluppi & Valentini (2009, pp. xv–xvi) explicitly acknowledge in the preface of
their carefully annotated edition of the proceedings of the 1927 Solvay conference, their main
objective was to show how the current debates over the foundations of quantum theory could
benefit from being traced back to the discussions between the founding fathers attending
this conference shortly after the theory in its various guises had first been formulated.
4 In Bananaworld, Bub makes a similar point. Heisenberg’s first paper on what would
become matrix mechanics, he writes, “contained the germ of a radically new way of thinking
about physical systems . . . while Schrödinger’s wave mechanics evoked a very different
structural picture that has turned out to be misleading in many ways” (Bub, 2016, p. 4). The
development of quantum mechanics—as Olivier Darrigol (2014, p. 237) puts it about as
concisely as one can imagine—was driven by two analogies, “the analogy between classical
and quantum theory [and] the analogy between matter and light. These analogies led to
two different versions of the new mechanics: the Heisenberg-Born-Jordan matrix mechanics
and the De Broglie-Schrödinger wave mechanics, which occurred in two different contexts:
atomic constitution and the statistical properties of matter and light.”
5 In the preface of his book on quantum computing, Mermin (2007, p. xii) notes that his
presentation “is suffused with a perspective on the quantum theory that is very close to the
venerable but recently much reviled Copenhagen interpretation,” so much so, in fact, that he
considered calling his book Copenhagen Computation.
6 David Wallace (2019) provides an example from the quantum foundations literature that
shows that the “big discoveries” of matrix and wave mechanics are not mutually exclusive.
He argues that the Everett interpretation should be seen as a general new framework for
physics while endorsing the view that vectors in Hilbert space represent what is real in the
quantum world. Wallace and other Oxford Everettians derive the Born rule for probabilities
in quantum mechanics from decision-theoretic considerations instead of taking it to be given
1 Introduction 3

The interpretation for which we will advocate in this volume can, more
specifically, be traced to the (statistical) transformation theory of Pascual Jor-
dan (1927a,b) and Paul Dirac (1927, amplified in his famous book, Dirac,
1930) and to the “probability-theoretic construction” (Wahrscheinlichkeitsthe-
oretischer Aufbau) of quantum mechanics in the second installment of the
trilogy of papers by John Von Neumann (1927a,b,c) that would form the back-
bone of his famous book (Von Neumann, 1932). While incorporating the wave
functions of wave mechanics, both Jordan’s and Dirac’s version of transforma-
tion theory grew out of matrix mechanics. More strongly than Dirac, Jordan
emphasized the statistical aspect. The “new foundation” (Neue Begründung)
of quantum mechanics announced in the titles of Jordan’s 1927 papers con-
sisted of a number of postulates about the probability of finding a value for
one quantum variable given the value of another. Von Neumann belongs to
that same lineage. Although he proved the mathematical equivalence of wave
and matrix mechanics in the process (by showing that they correspond to two
different instantiations of Hilbert space), he wrote his 1927 trilogy in direct
response to Jordan’s version of transformation theory. His Wahrscheinlichkeits-
theoretischer Aufbau grew out of his dissatisfaction with Jordan’s treatment
of probabilities. Drawing on work in probability theory by Richard von Mises
(soon to be published in book form; Von Mises, 1928), he introduced the now
familiar density operators characterizing uniform (pure state) and non-uniform
(mixed state) ensembles of quantum systems.7 He showed that what came to be
known as the Born rule for probabilities in quantum mechanics can be derived
from the Hilbert space formalism and some seemingly innocuous assump-
tions about properties of the function that gives expectation values (Duncan
& Janssen, 2013, sec. 6, pp. 246–251). This derivation was later re-purposed
for the infamous von Neumann no-hidden variables proof, in which case the
assumptions, entirely appropriate in the context of the Hilbert space formal-

by the Hilbert space formalism the way von Neumann showed one could (see below). For
other Everettians, such as Christoph Lehner, state vectors are both ontic and epistemic. They
help themselves to the Born rule à la von Neumann but also use state vectors to represent
physical reality. One way to argue for such a position (suggested by a talk by Lehner
during the workshop in Berlin in January 2020 mentioned in the preface) is to insist on a
Lewisian modal realist interpretation of probabilities. One could then agree with members
of the “epistemic camp” that quantum mechanics provides a new framework for handling
probabilities but at the same time hold on to the notion of a multiverse.
7 For historical analysis of these developments, focusing on Jordan and von Neumann, see
Duncan & Janssen (2013) and, for a summary aimed at a broader audience, Janssen (2019,
pp. 142–161).
4 1 Introduction

ism of quantum mechanics, become highly questionable (Bub, 2010a, Dieks,

2017).
A branch on the phylogenetic tree of interpretations of quantum mechanics
close to our own is the one with Jeffrey Bub and Itamar Pitowsky’s (2010)
“Two dogmas about quantum mechanics,” a play on W. V. O. Quine’s (1951)
celebrated “Two dogmas of empiricism.” Bub and Pitowsky presented (an early
version of) their paper in the Everettians’ lion’s den at the 2007 conference
in Oxford marking the 50th anniversary of the Everett interpretation.8 It ap-
pears in the proceedings of that conference. Enlisting the help of his daughter
Tanya, a graphic artist, Bub has since mounted an impressive PR campaign
to bring his and Pitowsky’s take on quantum mechanics to the masses. De-
spite its title and lavish illustrations, his first attempt, Bananaworld: Quantum
Mechanics for Primates (Bub, 2016), is not really a popular book. Its sequel,
however, the graphic novel Totally Random (Bub & Bub, 2018), triumphantly
succeeds where Bananaworld, in that respect, came up short.9 The interpre-
tation promoted overtly in Bananaworld and covertly in Totally Random has
been dubbed Bubism by Robert Rynasiewicz (private communication).10 Like
QBism, Bubism is an informational interpretation but for a Bubist quantum
probabilities are objective chances whereas for a QBist they are subjective
degrees of belief (Fuchs & Stacey, 2019). We will defend our own version
of Bubism, building on the Bubs’ two books and on “Two dogmas . . . ” as
well as on earlier work by (Jeff) Bub and Pitowsky, especially the latter’s lec-
ture notes Quantum Probability—Quantum Logic and his papers on George
Boole’s “conditions of possible experience” (Pitowsky, 1989a, 1994). We will
rely heavily on tools developed by these two authors, Bub’s correlation arrays

8 The video of their talk could, at the time we wrote this, still be watched at <users.ox.ac.
uk/~everett/videobub.htm>. See Bub & Demopoulos (2010) for a moving obituary of
Pitowsky.
9 See, e.g., the review in Physics World by Minnesota physicist Jim Kakalios (2018), well-
known for his use of comic books to explain physics (Kakalios, 2009), the review in Physics
Today by philosopher of quantum mechanics Richard Healey (2019), and the essay review
co-authored by one of us (Cuffaro & Doyle, 2021).
10 In an essay review of Ball (2018), Becker (2018) and Freire (2015), Bub (2019a) gives a
concise characterization of his views and places them in the lineage of Heisenberg sketched
above (cf. note 4). In Chapter 6, we will quote various passages from Bohr (1928, 1935,
1937, 1948, 1958) that help convey the way that Bohr fits into this lineage (see Section
6.5, notes 23, 45, 47 and 49). For more on our lineage’s connection with Bohr’s views, see
the preprint Bub (2017, the sections on Bohr were dropped in the published version of the
paper), Bub (2019a, pp. 235–236) and an unpublished monograph by Demopoulos (2018,
see below).
1 Introduction 5

and Pitowsky’s correlation polytopes. A third musketeer on whose insights

we drew for our own work is William Demopoulos (see, e.g., Demopoulos,
2010, 2012, and, especially, 2018, a monograph he completed shortly before
he died, which we fervently hope will be published soon).11 , 12
In the spirit of Bananaworld, Totally Random and Louisa Gilder’s (2008)
lovely The Age of Entanglement, we wrote Chapter 2 with a non-specialist
audience in mind (cf. our comments in the preface).13 We will frame our
argument in that chapter in terms of a variation of Bub’s scheme for peeling
and tasting quantum bananas (see Figures 2.1 and 2.2). This is not just a
gimmick adopted for pedagogical purposes. It is also meant to remind the
reader that, on a Bubist view, inspired by Heisenberg rather than Schrödinger,
quantum mechanics provides a new framework for dealing with arbitrary
physical systems, be they waves, particles, fields, or fictitious quantum bananas.
The peeling and tasting of bananas also makes for an apt metaphor for the
(projective) measurements we will be considering throughout (cf. Popescu,
2016). Our variation on Bub’s peel-and-taste scheme makes it easy to pivot,
in Section 4.1, from tasting bananas peeled in different ways to measuring the
spin of particles sent through Du Bois magnets pointing in different directions
in variations on the famous Stern-Gerlach experiment.14
Despite our phylogenetic proximity to Bub, we follow Jordan rather than
Bub in arguing that quantum mechanics is essentially a new framework for

11 Bub (2016, 2nd ed., p. 232, note 29) acknowledges the importance of discussions with
Demopoulos for his thinking about quantum mechanics and cites Demopoulos (2010, 2012).
12 We consider the views of Bub, Demopoulos and Pitowsky to be our neighbors on the
phylogenetic tree of interpretations of quantum mechanics. Although we would not call
QBism a neighboring view, we take it to be closer to us than many others. The same, we
think, can also be said about the views of, among others, Scott Aaronson (2013), Časlav
Brukner (2017), Lucien Hardy (2001), Richard Healey (2017) and Carlo Rovelli (1996).
13 We adopted the convention of using “Chapter” and “Section” when referring to other
parts of this volume and “Ch.” and “sec.” when referring to chapters and sections in other
sources we cite or quote. Equations are numbered by section (e.g., Eq. 2.3.1 refers to the
first equation in Chapter 2, Section 2.3). Figures and tables are numbered by chapter (e.g.,
Figure 2.1 refers to the first figure in Chapter 2). Notes are also numbered by chapter. Unless
a chapter number is specified, a reference to a note is to the note of that number in the same
chapter.
14 See Section 6.5 (especially note 41 and Figure 6.1) for a description of such experiments,
first performed by Walther Gerlach and Otto Stern (1922).
6 1 Introduction

handling probability rather than information.15, 16 We are under no illusion that

this substitution will help us steer clear of two knee-jerk objections to infor-
mational approaches to the foundations of quantum mechanics: parochialism
and instrumentalism (or anti-realism).
What invites complaints of parochialism is the slogan “Quantum mechan-
ics is all about information.” This slogan conjures up the unflattering image
of a quantum-computing engineer, whose worldview is much like that of the
proverbial carpenter who only has a hammer and sees everything as a nail. It
famously led John Bell (1990, p. 34) to object: “Whose information? Infor-
mation about what?” In Bananaworld, Bub (2016, p. 7) counters: “we don’t
ask these questions about a USB flash drive. A 64 GB drive is an information
storage device with a certain capacity, and whose information or information
about what is irrelevant.” A computer analogy, however, is probably not the
most effective way to combat the lingering impression of parochialism. We
can think of two better responses.
The first is an analogy with meter rather than memory sticks. Consider the
slogan “Special relativity is all about space-time” or “Special relativity is all
about spatio-temporal relations.” These slogans, we suspect, would not provoke
the hostile reactions routinely elicited by the slogan “Quantum mechanics is
all about information.” Yet, one could ask, parroting Bell: “spatio-temporal
relations of what?” The rejoinder in this case is simply that what could be any
physical system allowed by the theory; and that, to qualify as such, it suffices
that what can consistently be described in terms of mathematical quantities that
transform as scalars, vectors, tensors or spinors under Lorentz transformations.
When we say that a moving meter stick contracts by such-and-such a factor, we

15 This departure from Bub is not as big as it sounds. As Bub (2016, p. 6) makes clear
in Bananaworld, “[i]n modern formulations, information theory is about random variables
. . . and correlations between random variables. As such, information theory is a branch of
the mathematical theory of probability.” We chose to call our interpretation “informational”
(in part) to emphasize our proximity to Bub’s view, but unlike Bub we chose not to call our
interpretation “information-theoretic.” The latter term would suggest an explicit connection
to results from information theory in the Shannon or Schumacher senses, but in our case we
are using information only in the general sense just described.
16 Others who have endorsed this view include Hardy (2001, p. 1), who has called quantum
theory “simply a new type of probability theory” (quoted by Darrigol, 2014, p. 318), and
Aaronson, who in the preface of Quantum Computing since Democritus relates the amusing
story of how an Australian TV commercial made him realize that a passage from his
book used in that commercial nicely captures the book’s central thesis: quantum mechanics
is “about information, probabilities, and observables, and how they relate to each other”
(Aaronson, 2013, p. xii–xiv, p. 110). See also note 29.
1 Introduction 7

only have to specify its velocity with respect to the inertial frame of interest, not
what it is made of. Special relativity imposes certain kinematical constraints
on any physical system allowed by the theory. Those constraints are codified in
the geometry of Minkowski space-time. There is no need to reify Minkowski
space-time, no need for “fetishism of mathematics” as John Stachel (1994,
p. 149) would put it. We can think of space-time in relational rather than
substantival terms (Janssen, 2009, p. 28).
The slogan “Quantum mechanics is all about information/probability” can
be unpacked in a similar way. Quantum mechanics imposes kinematical con-
straints on allowed values and combinations of values of observables. Which
observables? Any observable that can be represented by a Hermitian operator
on Hilbert space. The constraints quantum mechanics imposes on the values
of such observables are codified in the geometry of Hilbert space. And as in
the case of Minkowski space-time, there is no need to reify Hilbert space. So,
yes, quantum mechanics is obviously about more than just information, just as
special relativity is obviously about more than just space-time. Yet the slogans
that special relativity is all about space-time and that quantum mechanics is
all about information (or probability) do capture—the way slogans do—what
is distinctive about these theories and what sets them apart from the theories
they superseded.
In Chapter 6, we will further explore this parallel between quantum me-
chanics and special relativity.17 We should warn the reader upfront though that
the kinematical take on special relativity underlying this comparison, while
in line with the majority view among physicists, is not without its detractors.
In fact, the defense of a kinematical interpretation of special relativity by one
of us (Janssen, 2009) was mounted in response to an alternative dynamical
interpretation of special relativity articulated and defended most forcefully by
Harvey Brown (2005).18 Both Bub (2016, p. 228) in Bananaworld and Bub
& Pitowsky (2010, p. 439) in “Two dogmas . . . ” have invoked analogies with
special relativity to defend their information-theoretic interpretation of quan-

17 Janssen (2009, p. 28) distinguishes between phenomena being kinematical in a narrow

and in a broad sense, defined as being an example of default spatio-temporal behavior and
being independent of the specifics of the dynamics, respectively. In this volume, we use the
term kinematical in the latter sense. For a history of kinematics in the traditional sense of
the science or geometry of motion, see Martínez (2009).
18 See Acuña (2014) for an enlightening discussion of the debate over whether special
relativity is best understood kinematically or dynamically.
8 1 Introduction

tum mechanics. Brown & Timpson (2006) have disputed the cogency of these
analogies (see also Timpson, 2010, 2013, sec. 8.3.3).19
Our second response to the parochialism charge is that the quantum for-
malism for dealing with intrinsic angular momentum, i.e., spin, laid out in
Section 4.1 and used throughout in our quantum-mechanical analysis of an ex-
perimental setup to test the Bell inequalities, is key to spectroscopy and other
areas of physics as well, such as, e.g., the theory of the electric susceptibility of
diatomic gases. These two responses are not unrelated. In Section 6.4, drawing
on papers on the history of quantum physics co-authored by one of us,20 we
will give a few examples of puzzles for the old quantum theory that physicists
resolved not by altering the dynamical equations but by using key features of
the kinematical core of the new quantum mechanics.
What about the other charge against informational interpretations of quan-
tum mechanics, instrumentalism or anti-realism? What invites complaints on
this score in the case of Bub and Pitowsky is their rejection of the second
of the “two dogmas” they identified: “the quantum state is a representation
of physical reality” (Bub & Pitowsky, 2010, p. 433).21 This statement of the
purported dogma is offered as shorthand for a more elaborate one: “[T]he
quantum state has an ontological significance analogous to the significance of
the classical state as the ‘truthmaker’ for propositions about the occurrence
or non-occurrence of events” (ibid.). Of course, denying that state vectors in
Hilbert space represent physical reality in and of itself does not make one an
anti-realist. We can still be realists as long as we can point to other elements
of the theory’s formalism that represent physical reality. The sentence we just
quoted from “Two dogmas . . . ” suggests that for Bub and Pitowsky “events” fit
that bill. However, as John Earman (1989, p. 186) has argued regarding taking
point coincidences to exhaust what is real in general relativity, such an event
ontology smacks of “a crude verificationism and an impoverished conception
of physical reality.” In Section 6.5 we argue that one can do considerably better
without reinstating the dogma that Bub and Pitowsky want to reject.

19 What complicates matters here is that the distinction between kinematics and dynam-
ics tends to get conflated with the distinction between constructive and principle theories
(Janssen, 2009, p. 38; see Section 6.1 below for further discussion).
20 Duncan & Janssen (2008, 2014, 2015) and Midwinter & Janssen (2013).
21 In what he identifies as “orthodox quantum mechanics,” Wallace (2016, p. 4) detects
“an inchoate attitude to the quantum state . . . where it is interpreted either as physically
representational or as probabilistic, according to context.” This representational/probabilistic
distinction is cited by Bub (2016, 2nd ed., p. 231, note 21). In Section 6.5, we will return to
this point and characterize the “inchoate attitude” Wallace draws attention to more carefully.
1 Introduction 9

By focusing on “events”, Bub and Pitowsky privilege dynamical observable

quantities (e.g., energy, momentum, spin in the z-direction, . . . ) over fixed pa-
rameters that may or may not be directly observable (e.g., rest mass and electric
charge or bare masses and coupling constants, respectively) when it comes to
representing physical reality. We do not. Neither in classical nor in quantum
mechanics do we simply posit some grab bag of observable quantities to rep-
resent physical reality. Rather, constrained by factors such as the empirical
and explanatory successes of prior theory, the existing mathematical toolkit,
and the culturally specific reservoir of metaphors and analogies available for
heuristic purposes (wave and particle imagery for instance),22 we posit systems
with fixed properties such as mass, charge, and spin and introduce dynamical
observable quantities as further properties of such systems. The objects of our
everyday macroscopic world and their states are then constructed somehow out
of catalogs of values, be they variable or constant, of these quantities, be they
dynamical or fixed. How exactly this is done is a question physicists may want
to leave for philosophers to ponder, especially since this is not what separates
quantum from classical mechanics.
The key difference between classical and quantum mechanics lies in how
values are assigned to dynamical quantities. Bub and Pitowsky’s notion of
a “truthmaker” provides a nice way to articulate this difference. In classical
mechanics, dynamical observable quantities are represented by functions on
the phase space of the system in question. Picking a point in phase space fixes
the values of all these quantities. It is in this sense that points in phase space
are “truthmakers”. In quantum mechanics, dynamical observable quantities
are represented by Hermitian operators on Hilbert space. The possible values
of these quantities are given by the eigenvalues of these operators. Picking a
vector in Hilbert space, however, does not fix the value of these quantities in
advance of a measurement. It fails to do so in two ways. First, the quantity
or quantities being measured must be selected. Only those selected get to be
assigned definite values. Quantum mechanics tells us that, once a selection is
made, it is impossible for any quantity represented by an operator that does not
commute with those representing the selected one(s) to be assigned a definite
value as well. Second, even after a selection has been made, the state vector
will in general only give a probability distribution over the various eigenvalues
of the operators corresponding to the selected observables. Which of those
values is found upon measurement of the observable is a matter of chance.
Vectors in Hilbert space thus doubly fail to be “truthmakers”. Pace Bub and

22 For reflections by one of us on how new theories get introduced, see Janssen (2002, 2019).
10 1 Introduction

Pitowsky, however, it does not follow that classical and quantum states have
a different “ontological significance.” Neither vectors in Hilbert space nor
points in phase space represent our physical world.23 Both are mathematical
auxiliaries for assigning values (albeit in radically different ways) to quantities
that do.24
What about the first dogma Bub & Pitowsky (2010, p. 433) want to reject:
Measurement outcomes should be fully explained in terms of the dynamical
interaction between the system being measured and a measuring device? Strik-
ing this dogma from the quantum catechism trivially solves the measurement
problem in its traditional form of having two different dynamics side-by-side,
unitary Schrödinger evolution as long as we do not make a measurement, state
vector collapse as soon as we do. If we reject the demand for a dynamical
account of how a measurement results in a particular definite outcome, this
problem obviously evaporates. As we will show in Section 6.5, renouncing
this dogma does not amount to black-boxing measurements.25 On Bub and
Pitowsky’s view, any measurement can be analyzed in as much detail as one
can ask for. It does mean, however, that one accepts that there comes a point
where no meaningful further analysis can be given of why a measurement
gives one particular outcome rather than another. Instead it becomes a matter
of irreducible randomness—the ultimate crapshoot.26
Bub & Pitowsky (2010, p. 438) distinguish between what they, with thick
irony, call a “big” and a “small” measurement problem. This distinction maps
nicely onto the two ways distinguished above in which the quantum state
vector fails to be a “truthmaker”. Those two ways correspond to two questions:
(I) How does one set of observables rather than another get selected to be

23 We will discuss this more carefully in Section 6.5.

24 In Wahrscheinlichkeitstheoretischer Aufbau, von Neumann also resisted the idea that
vectors in Hilbert space ultimately represent (our knowledge of) physical reality. He wrote:
“our knowledge of a system S0 , i.e., of the structure of a statistical ensemble {S01 , S02 ,
. . .}, is never described by the specification of a state—or even by the corresponding ϕ
[i.e., the vector |ϕi]; but usually by the result of measurements performed on the system”
(Von Neumann, 1927b, p. 260). He thus wanted to represent “our knowledge of a system” by
the values of a set of observables corresponding to a complete set of commuting operators
(Duncan & Janssen, 2013, pp. 251–252).
25 Wallace raised this objection to Bub and Pitowsky’s presentation of “Two dogmas . . . ”
in Oxford in 2007 (Saunders, Barrett, Kent, & Wallace, 2010, p. 597).
26 We realize that it is easier to swallow this “totally random” response for the observables
we will be considering (where the spin of some particle can be up or down or a banana can
taste yummy or nasty) than for others, such as, notably, position (where a particle can be
here or on the other side of the universe).
1 Introduction 11

assigned definite values? (II) Why does an observable, once selected, take on
one value rather than another? These two questions can be seen as statements
of the “small” and the “big” measurement problem, respectively.27 Rejection
of what Bub and Pitowsky identify as the first dogma of quantum mechanics
then amounts to dismissing the “big” measurement problem as a pseudo-
problem. They urge us to resist the call for a general dynamical account of how
measurements result in definite outcomes and endorse their “totally random”
response to question (II) instead. Though arguments from authority will not
carry much weight in these matters, we note that a prominent member of
the Copenhagen camp did endorse this very answer. In an essay originally
published in 1954, Wolfgang Pauli wrote: “Like an ultimate fact without
any cause, the individual outcome of a measurement is . . . in general not
comprehended by laws” (Pauli, 1994, p. 32, quoted by Gilder, 2008, p. 169).
Bub and Pitowsky thus do not see the “big” measurement problem as a problem
but as a lesson quantum mechanics has taught us about how the world behaves.
It is not a puzzle to be solved but a feature to be embraced.
The same is true for the “small” measurement problem. As we will explain
in more detail in Chapter 6, our response to the question of which observables
get assigned definite values is that this is decided by the experimenter. The
experimenter chooses which question to put to nature. It is, we submit, not a
task for physics to account for such decisions. It certainly never was for classical
mechanics. One might object that this is only because, in classical mechanics,
such decisions are irrelevant to the way in which observables acquire definite
values. In classical mechanics, the decision to perform this rather than that
measurement amounts to no more than choosing to ascertain the value of this
rather than that observable, where all these values are taken to be pre-given.
In quantum mechanics, by contrast, a decision to perform a measurement to
obtain a value for one observable will typically preclude the assignment of a
definite value to another observable that could have been measured instead.
Such decisions thus select the catalog of values of observable quantities used
in the construction of our conception of reality.
Yet the difference between classical and quantum mechanics on this score
is not as big as it seems. Even though according to classical mechanics de-
cisions about which measurement to perform do not influence the possible
outcomes of that measurement (or any other measurement that could have
been performed instead), these decisions clearly do affect the actual catalog

27 The “small” measurement problem is familiar to Everettians as the preferred-basis prob-

lem.
12 1 Introduction

of values of observables obtained and hence the reality constructed with the
help of them. What door a contestant picks on Monty Hall’s “Let’s make a
deal” does not affect what is behind that door but it obviously does make a
difference whether that door has a check for a thousand dollars or a goat behind
it (cf., e.g., Janssen & Pernice, 2020). As this simple example illustrates, the
difference between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics is not whether
decisions about what to measure affect what is real or what happens. What
is different is that in quantum mechanics such decisions affect what is real
or what happens at a deeper level than in classical mechanics, namely at the
level of possibilities. Rather than insisting that quantum mechanics provide an
account of the kind of decisions we did not expect classical physics to account
for, however, we can take the fact that it does not as another lesson quantum
mechanics taught us about the world—just as it taught us that, at rock bottom,
the world is irreducibly stochastic.
The “small” measurement problem, we will argue in Section 6.5, is only a
problem if we insist that we, as observers, can be completely written out of
our description of the physical world. This was certainly the goal of classical
physics. But quantum mechanics tells us that we and our measuring devices are
entangled with the rest of the world, that the probabilities quantum mechanics
gives us are ultimately all marginal probabilities obtained once we trace out the
degrees of freedom of us and our measuring devices. To use another slogan
we will unpack in Section 6.5, quantum mechanics is hard to square with
the classical ideal of the “view from nowhere.” To bolster our case, we will
briefly discuss the analysis of two historians of early-modern science of how
this classical ideal took shape in the 17th century through developments in
optics from Kepler to Descartes (Gal & Chen-Morris, 2013, Ch. 1, “Science’s
disappearing observer”). Their analysis suggests that while this classical ideal
proved to be extremely useful for the development of optics and physics more
generally from the 17th through the 19th century, it was never inevitable.
Whether or not we are able to convince the reader that either the “big” or
the “small” or both measurement problems are pseudo-problems—not bugs
but features—we hope to convince the reader of the more general thesis that
quantum mechanics, at its core, is a new framework for handling probabilities
(cf. notes 6, 16 and 29). Our main argument for this thesis will come from
our analysis—in terms of Bub’s correlation arrays and Pitowsky’s correlation
polytopes—of correlations found in measurements on systems in a special but
informative quantum state in a simple experimental setup due to David Mermin
(1981, 1988) to test a Bell inequality (see Figure 2.6 for the correlation array
for Mermin’s example of correlations violating this particular inequality).
1 Introduction 13

We introduce special raffles to determine which of these quantum corre-

lations can be simulated by local hidden-variable theories (see Figure 2.11
for an example of tickets for such raffles and Figures 2.12 and 2.14 for exam-
ples of the correlation arrays that raffles with different mixes of these tickets
give rise to). These raffles will serve as toy models of local hidden-variable
theories. They are both easy to visualize and tolerably tractable mathemat-
ically (see Section 4.2). They also make for a natural classical counterpart
to the statistical ensembles characterized by density operators introduced in
von Neumann’s formulation of quantum mechanics in Wahrscheinlichkeitsthe-
oretischer Aufbau, which were themselves inspired by von Mises’s classical
statistical ensembles. The “quantum raffles” in the title of our book refer to
these quantum statistical ensembles. In Section 6.5 we will rely heavily on a
comparison between our raffles and these “quantum raffles” to bring out what
is new about quantum theory compared to classical theory. It is with malice
aforethought that we construct our raffles in such a way that they can serve
as simple examples of local hidden-variable theories suffering from the “big”
(albeit easily cured) measurement problem but not the “small” one (see note
9 in Section 3.2).
The quantum state we will focus on is that of two particles of spin s entangled
in the so-called singlet state (with zero overall spin). For most of our argument
it suffices to consider the s = 21 case. In Chapter 2 we focus on this case.
Our analysis, however, is informed (and justified) at several junctures by our
analysis in Chapter 4 of cases with arbitrary integer or half-integer values of s.
In Section 4.1, we analyze the quantum correlations for s > 12 ; in Section 4.2
we analyze raffles designed to simulate as many features as possible of these
quantum correlations.
In Chapter 5, returning to the special case that s = 12 , we show how our
analysis in Chapters 2 and 4 can be adapted to the more common experimental
setup used to test the CHSH inequality (Clauser, Horne, Shimony, & Holt,
1969). The advantage of the Mermin setup, as we will see in Chapter 2, is that
in that case the classes of correlations allowed by quantum mechanics and by
local hidden-variable theories can be pictured in ordinary three-dimensional
space. The corresponding picture for the setup to test the CHSH inequality is
four-dimensional.
The class of all correlations in the Mermin setup that cannot be used for
sending signals faster than light can be represented by an ordinary three-
dimensional cube, the so-called non-signaling cube for this setup; the class of
correlations allowed by quantum mechanics by an elliptope contained within
this cube; those allowed by classical mechanics by a tetrahedron contained
14 1 Introduction

within this elliptope (see Figures 2.15 and 2.16). This provides a concrete
example of the way in which Pitowsky and others (see, e.g., Goh, Kaniewski,
Wolfe, Vértesi, Wu, Cai, Liang, & Scarani, 2018) have used nested polytopes28
to represent the convex sets formed by these classes and subclasses of corre-
lations (compare the cross-section of the non-signaling cube, the tetrahedron
and the elliptope in Figure 2.8 to the familiar Vitruvian-man-like cartoon in
Figure 2.5). Such polytopes completely characterize these classes of correla-
tions whereas the familiar Bell inequalities (in the case of local hidden-variable
theories) or Tsirelson bounds (in the case of quantum mechanics) only provide
partial characterizations.
As Pitowsky pointed out in the preface of Quantum Probability—Quantum
Logic:
The possible range of values of classical correlations is constrained by linear in-
equalities which can be represented as facets of polytopes, which I call “classical
correlation polytopes.” These constraints have been the subject of investigation by
probability theorists and statisticians at least since the 1930s, though the context of
investigation was far removed from physics (Pitowsky, 1989a, p. IV).

The constraint expressed by the non-linear elliptope inequality has likewise

been investigated by probability theorists and statisticians before in contexts far
removed from physics. As we will see in Chapter 3, it can be found in a paper by
Udny Yule (1897) on what are now called Pearson correlation coefficients as
well as in papers by Ronald A. Fisher (1924) and Bruno de Finetti (1937). Yule,
like Pearson, was especially interested in applications in evolutionary biology
(see Chapter 3, notes 2 and 3). We illustrate the results of these statisticians
with a simple physics example, involving a balance beam with three pans
containing different weights (see Figure 3.5). These antecedents in probability
theory and statistics provide us with our strongest argument for the thesis that
the Hilbert space formalism of quantum mechanics is best understood as a
general framework for handling probabilities in a world in which only some
observables can be assigned definite values.29

28 The term was coined by Alicia Boole Stott, George Boole’s mathematician daughter,
who was introduced to the mathematics of higher dimensions by her brother-in-law, Charles
Howard Hinton, also a mathematician (who was at the University of Minnesota in the late
1890s) and a notorious polygamist. We are grateful to Louisa Gilder for alerting us to the
relevant Wikipedia entries.
29 As the authors of a book on quantum information intended for a broad audience write:
“the mathematical formalisms [sic] underlying quantum theory can be precisely and usefully
viewed as an extension of probability theory” (Rieffel & Polak, 2011, p. 331, cf. note 16
above). The story of Pearson, Yule, Fisher and De Finetti in Chapter 3 illustrates their lament
1 Introduction 15

In Section 2.6 we show that it follows directly from the geometry of Hilbert
space that the correlations found in our simple quantum system are constrained
by the elliptope inequality and do not saturate the non-signaling cube. This
derivation of the elliptope inequality is thus a derivation from within quantum
mechanics.
Popescu & Rohrlich (1994) and others have asked why quantum mechanics
does not allow all non-signaling correlations. They introduced an imaginary
device, now called a PR box, that exhibits non-signaling correlations stronger
than those allowed by quantum mechanics.30 Several authors have looked
for information-theoretic principles that would reduce the class of all non-
signaling correlations to those allowed by quantum mechanics and rule out
devices such as PR boxes (Clifton, Bub, & Halvorson, 2003; Bub, 2016, Ch.
9; Cuffaro, 2020). Such principles would allow us to derive the elliptope
inequality from without.31
What the result of Yule and others shows is that the elliptope inequality
expresses a general constraint on the possible correlations between three arbi-
trary random variables. It has nothing to do with quantum mechanics per se.
As such it provides an instructive example of a kinematical constraint encoded
in the geometrical structure of Hilbert space, just as time dilation and length
contraction provide instructive examples of kinematical constraints encoded
in the geometrical structure of Minkowski space-time.
After summarizing the results presented in Chs. 2–5 in Section 6.1, we
return to this and other analogies between quantum mechanics and special
relativity in the remainder of Chapter 6. In Section 6.2, we take a closer look at
the interplay between from within and from without approaches to understand-
ing fundamental features of quantum mechanics. In Section 6.3 we present our
take on the new kinematics of quantum mechanics. In Section 6.4, as men-
tioned above, we give some examples of puzzles of the old quantum theory
solved with the help of the new kinematics of the new quantum mechanics. In
Section 6.5, we address the thorny issue of measurement, arguing in support
of Bub and Pitowsky’s claim that what they identified as the “big” and “small”

that “the close relationship between the formal structures underlying quantum mechanics
and probability theory is surprisingly neglected” (ibid.).
30 See Figure 2.3 for the correlation array for a PR box. Figures 2.9 and 2.10 show that it is
impossible to design tickets for a raffle that could simulate the correlations generated by a
PR box.
31 We took the within/without terminology from the chorus of Bob Dylan’s song “The Mighty
Quinn”: “Come all without, come all within. You’ll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn.”
Could “Mighty Quinn” be an oblique but prescient reference to a quantum computer?
16 1 Introduction

measurement problems should be treated not as problems to be solved but as

lessons to be learned from quantum mechanics. While both the “small” and
the “big” problem point to striking new features of the quantum world, we will
argue that the novelty revealed by the former is more profound. One way to
describe this new feature is that a quantum state gives us a family of probability
distributions that do not add up to one joint probability distribution. Put in the
language preferred by Bub and Pitowsky, it gives us a collection of Boolean
algebras that cannot be combined into one overarching Boolean algebra. We
will unpack these slogans in Chapter 6. Finally, in Chapter 7, we briefly sum-
marize the views defended in Chapter 6 on the basis of the results presented
in Chapters 2–5. In line with Bub’s own views, we intend our defense of (our
version of) Bubism to double as a way to make sense of the views of Niels
Bohr (cf. note 10 above).32
We want to make one more observation before we get down to business.
As already noted above, it is not surprising that the correlations found in
measurements on pairs of particles of (half-)integer spin s in the singlet state
do not saturate the non-signaling cube. No such correlations between three
random variables could. What is surprising is that these correlations saturate
the elliptope even in the spin- 12 case. This is in striking contrast to the correla-
tions that can be generated with the raffles designed to simulate the quantum
correlations. In the spin- 12 case, the correlations allowed by our raffles are all
represented by points inside the tetrahedron inscribed in the elliptope. As we
will see in Chapter 3, this is because there are only two possible outcomes in
the spin- 12 case, ±1/2 (in units of h̄, Planck’s constant divided by 2π). In the
spin-s case, there are 2s + 1 possible outcomes: −s, −s + 1, . . . , s − 1, s (again,
in units of h̄). With considerable help from the computer (see the flowchart in
Figure 4.7 and the discussion of its limitations in Section 4.2.4), we generated
figures showing that, with increasing s, the correlations allowed by the raffles
designed to simulate the quantum correlations are represented by polyhedra
that get closer and closer to the elliptope (see Figures 4.11, 4.13 and 4.17 for
s = 1, 3/2, 2, 5/2). That the quantum correlations already fully saturate the ellip-
tope in the spin- 12 case is due to a remarkable feature of quantum mechanics:
it allows a sum to have a definite value even if the individual terms in this sum
do not (see Section 3.2).

32 For the views of one of us on the basic framework of Bohr’s interpretation of quantum
mechanics, see Cuffaro (2010).
Chapter 2
Representing distant correlations by
correlation arrays and polytopes
Peeling and tasting quantum bananas in the Mermin-style setup • Trying to simulate the
quantum correlations with classical raffles • Nested classes of correlations: non-signaling
cube, quantum elliptope, classical tetrahedron.

2.1 Taking Mermin to Bananaworld

In the preface and in Chapter 1, we promised that this chapter would be acces-
sible to readers without any background in physics and would not presuppose
any mathematics beyond basic high-school algebra and geometry (and would
involve absolutely no calculus!). We intend to make good on that promise.
But before we start, in Section 2.2, with our elementary introduction to some
of the most puzzling facts about the physical world that quantum mechanics
confronts us with, we need to say a few words about how our approach fits
with earlier attempts to explain these matters to a broader audience.1
In addition to Bananaworld (Bub, 2016), our approach owes much to the
work of David Mermin (especially 1981, 1988). Like Mermin and Bub (and
many other popularizers), we will focus on so-called Bell inequalities, named
after John S. Bell (1964), who was the first to formulate one in the context of
quantum mechanics. As we will explain in detail in the course of this chapter,
quantum mechanics predicts that such inequalities will be violated by the
results of certain measurements on various quantum systems. These violations
have consistently been found in an ongoing series of remarkable experiments
stretching back to the early 1970s. An excellent account of these developments,
written for a general audience and based on interviews both with those who
formulated the inequalities and those who did the experiments showing that
they are violated can be found in The Age of Entanglement by Louisa Gilder
(2008, Chs. 29–31, pp. 250–289), a book we highly recommend.2

1 See also our comments in the preface, especially about the relation between our approach
and the approach taken in Albert (1992).
2 The term entanglement (Verschränkung in the original German) was introduced by
Schrödinger (1935). In quantum mechanics, the state of a composite system A + B can
in general not be decomposed into separate states for the two subsystems, A and B. Instead,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 17

M. Janas et al., Understanding Quantum Raffles, Boston Studies in the Philosophy
and History of Science 340, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85939-8_2
18 2 Representing distant correlations by correlation arrays and polytopes

The specific Bell inequality tested in most of these experiments was for-
mulated by John Clauser, Michael Horne, Abner Shimony and Richard Holt
(1969). Like the inequality originally proposed by Bell, the CHSH inequality—
to use the acronym by which it has come to be known—is a bound on the
strength of distant correlations allowed by so-called local hidden-variable the-
ories.3 The reason these inequalities are violated in quantum mechanics is
that the distant correlations found in measurements on pairs of systems in
entangled quantum states (see note 2) are stronger than the bounds set by these
inequalities. In Section 2.5, we will introduce special raffles that can serve as
toy models of local hidden-variable theories. For now, it suffices to say that, in
a local hidden-variable theory, outcomes of measurements are always prede-
termined by variables that (a) are not included in the quantum description of a
system (hence: hidden) and (b) cannot be affected by superluminal signals (i.e.,
signals traveling faster than light; this is what “local” means in this context).
The setup used to test the CHSH inequality involves two parties (affection-
ately known as Alice and Bob in much of the literature on quantum foundations,
quantum information and quantum computing), two settings per party of some
measuring device,4 and two outcomes per setting (labeled ‘0’ and ‘1’, ‘+’ and
‘−’, or ‘up’ and ‘down’). Bell (1964, pp. 18–19) originally considered three
rather than four settings, which we can label {â, b̂, ĉ}. In Bell’s setup, one party
performs measurements using the pair {â, b̂} while the other uses {b̂, ĉ}. In
the CHSH setup the two parties use two pairs that have no setting in common,
{â, b̂} and {â0 , b̂0 } in our notation. Mermin (1981, 1988) kept Bell’s three
settings but in his setup both parties use all three settings rather than just two

the states of the components A and B are inextricably intertwined or “entangled” in the state
of the compound system A + B. This linkage persists no matter how far the two subsystems
are separated, famously leading Einstein to refer to the phenomenon as “spooky action at
a distance” (spukhafte Fernwirkung; letter to Max Born of March 3, 1947; Born, 1971, p.
158). In an oft-quoted passage, Schrödinger (1935, p. 555) wrote that he “would not call
[entanglement] one but the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics” (quoted, e.g., in Bub
& Bub, 2018, p. 9). We will focus on a particular entangled state of two identical particles
characterized by their intrinsic angular momentum or spin. Eq. (2.6.38) gives this state for
the case of spin- 12 particles. This is the only quantum state we need for our purposes in this
chapter.
3 The Pearson correlation coefficient, which we will introduce in Chapter 3 (see Eq. (3.1.9)),
provides a measure of the strength of a correlation.
4 E.g., a polarizer to measure the polarization of photons or a Du Bois magnet to measure
the component of the spin of a particle in certain direction, as used in variations on the
Stern-Gerlach experiment (cf. Section 6.5, especially note 41 and Figure 6.1).
2.1 Taking Mermin to Bananaworld 19

of them. He derived a Bell inequality for this setup, so simple that even those
without Mermin’s pedagogical skills can explain it to a general audience.5
We use a Mermin-style setup to illustrate the power of some of the tools
in Bananaworld. We represent the correlations Mermin considered by corre-
lation arrays, the workhorse of Bananaworld, and parametrize these arrays in
such a way that they and the correlations they encode can, in turn, be repre-
sented as points in convex sets in so-called non-signaling cubes (a geometrical
representation of all correlations one can imagine for a given setup that can-
not be exploited to send superluminal signals). This approach was pioneered
by Itamar Pitowsky (1989b) in Quantum Probability—Quantum Logic and is
promoted in Bananaworld.6
The representation of classes of correlations in terms of (the geometry of)
convex sets is well-established in the quantum foundations literature (see, e.g.,
Goh et al., 2018). Our efforts can be seen as another attempt to bring this
approach to a broader audience by applying it to Mermin’s particularly simple
and instructive example. Here is what makes it so. Since the CHSH setup uses
four different settings, its non-signaling cube is a hypercube in four dimensions,
which is hard if not impossible to visualize. The Mermin-style setup only uses
three different settings and its non-signaling cube is an ordinary cube in three
dimensions, which is easy to visualize. The convex set representing the non-
signaling correlations allowed classically in this case is a tetrahedron spanned
by four of the eight vertices of the three-dimensional non-signaling cube (see
Figure 2.15); the convex set representing those allowed quantum-mechanically
is an elliptope enclosing this tetrahedron (see Figure 2.16).
In Bananaworld, settings become peelings, outcomes become tastes, and
parties become characters from Alice in Wonderland (Alice stars as Alice, the
White Rabbit as Bob). Fictitious quantum bananas can be peeled “from the
stem end (S)” or “from the top end (T )” and can only taste “ordinary (“o” or
0)” or “intense, incredible, indescribably delicious (“i” or 1)” (Bub, 2016, pp.
8–9, see also p. viii).7

5 For an excellent textbook treatment of the Bell inequality for this setup and the quantum-
mechanical results maximally violating it, see McIntyre (2012, sec. 4.1, pp. 97–102).
6 In addition to Quantum Probability—Quantum Logic, Bub (2016, p. 120) cites Pitowsky
(2006), his contribution to a Festschrift for Bub, as well as Pitowsky (1986, 1989a, 1991,
2008).
7 Betraying his information-theoretic leanings, Bub (2016) occasionally refers to inputs and
outputs (both taking on the values 0 and 1) rather than peelings and tastes (see, e.g., p. 51,
Figure 3.1).
20 2 Representing distant correlations by correlation arrays and polytopes

Bub’s banana-peeling scheme suffices for the discussion of the CHSH

inequality as well as for the analysis of so-called PR boxes, at least those of
the original design of their inventors, Popescu & Rohrlich (1994). We will use
the term “PR box” for any hypothetical system one can imagine that would
allow superquantum correlations (Bub, 2016, p. 106), i.e., correlations that
are even stronger than those allowed by quantum mechanics but are still non-
signaling (and would thus still be compatible with relativity theory). Like the
CHSH setup, the original design of a PR box involves two parties, two settings
per party, and two outcomes per setting. Bub’s scheme also works for the
analysis of correlations that arise in measurements on so-called GHZ states
(Greenberger, Horne, & Zeilinger, 1989). While these measurements involve
three rather than two parties,8 they still fit the mold of two settings per party
and two outcomes per setting. The Mermin-style setup breaks this mold by
using (the same) three settings for two parties.
To recreate the Mermin-style setup in Bananaworld we introduce a new
banana-peeling scheme (see Section 2.2). Our scheme allows infinitely many
different settings, readily translates into the actual physics of measuring spin
with Du Bois magnets (see note 4 above and Chapters 4–6 below), and, as
such, highlights elements of spherical symmetry in the Mermin-style setup
that turn out to be key to their quantum-mechanical analysis (see Sections 2.6
and 4.1).

2.2 Correlations found when peeling and tasting pairs of

quantum bananas

Imagine a species of banana that grows in pairs on special banana trees in

Bananaworld. These bananas can only taste yummy or nasty. Yet we cannot
say that they come in two flavors, as they only acquire a definite flavor once
they are peeled and tasted. We use these bananas in a long series of peel-and-
taste experiments following a protocol that closely matches the one followed
in Mermin’s (1981, 1988) setup for testing a Bell inequality (cf. Section 2.1).
Our Mermin-style setup in Bananaworld is illustrated in Figure 2.1.9
We pick a pair of bananas, still joined at the stem, from the banana tree.
We separate them and give one each to two chimps, Alice and Bob. Once they

8 Bub’s illustrator, his daughter Tanya, has the Cheshire Cat (starring as Clio) peel the third
GHZ banana (Bub, 2016, pp. 122–123, Clio and Charlie are introduced on p. 8).
9 This figure closely matches Figure 4.2 in the treatment of the Mermin-style setup in the
quantum-mechanics textbook by McIntyre (2012, p. 99, cf. note 5 and note 28).
2.2 Correlations found when peeling and tasting pairs of quantum bananas 21

Fig. 2.1 Mermin-style setup in Bananaworld (I). Two parties: the chimps Alice and Bob.
Three settings per party: three peelings, (â, b̂, ĉ), given by three unit vectors (ea , eb , ec ), in
the corresponding peeling directions (i.e., the direction of the line going from the top to the
stem of the banana while it is being peeled). In Mermin’s specific example, the angles ϕab
between ea and eb , ϕac between ea and ec , and ϕbc between eb and ec are all equal to 120°
but we will also consider other values for these angles. Drawing: Laurent Taudin with a nod
to Andy Warhol.

have received their respective bananas, they randomly and independently of

one another pick a particular peeling, defined by the peeling direction, i.e., the
direction of the line going from the top to the stem of the banana while it is
being peeled. Alice and Bob are instructed not to change the orientation of
their bananas while peeling so that it is unambiguous which peeling they are
using. In the Mermin-style setup, Alice and Bob get to choose between three
peelings, labeled â, b̂ and ĉ, represented by unit vectors, ea , eb and ec , with the
angles ϕab , ϕac and ϕbc between them all equal to 120° (see Figure 2.1). Once
they have randomly chosen one of these three peelings, they point the stem of
their banana in the direction of the corresponding unit vector and peel their
banana (it does not matter whether they peel from the top or from the stem).
When done peeling, Alice and Bob reposition their bananas and take a bite
to determine whether they taste yummy or nasty (see Figure 2.2). The whole
procedure is then repeated with a fresh pair of bananas from the banana tree.
In each run of this peel-and-taste experiment, Alice and Bob record that
run’s ordinal number, the peeling chosen (â, b̂ or ĉ) and the taste of their
banana, using “+” for “yummy” and “−” for “nasty”. Every precaution is
taken to ensure that, as long as there are more bananas to be peeled and tasted,
Alice and Bob cannot communicate. While they are peeling and tasting, the
only contact between them is that the bananas they are given come from pairs
originally joined at the stem on the banana tree.
22 2 Representing distant correlations by correlation arrays and polytopes

Fig. 2.2 Mermin-style setup in Bananaworld (II). Two outcomes per setting: the tastes
“yummy” (+) or “nasty” (−) for different peeling directions. The peeling and tasting is done
by the chimps Alice and Bob. Drawing: Laurent Taudin.

When all bananas are peeled and tasted, Alice and Bob are allowed to
compare notes. Just looking at their own records, they see nothing out of
the ordinary—just a sequence of pluses and minuses as random as if they
had faked their results by tossing a fair coin for every run. Comparing their
records, however, they note that, every time they happened to choose the same
peeling (in roughly 33% of the total number of runs), their results are perfectly
anti-correlated. Whenever one banana tasted yummy, its twin tasted nasty. In
and of itself, this is not particularly puzzling. Maybe our bananas always grow
in pairs in which one tastes yummy and the other tastes nasty and it is random
which one goes to which chimp. This simple explanation, however, is ruled out
by another striking correlation Alice and Bob discover while poring over their
data. When they happened to peel differently (in roughly 66% of the runs),
their results were positively correlated, albeit imperfectly. In 75% of the runs
in which they used different peelings, their bananas tasted the same (Mermin,
1981, p. 86).10 The tastes of two bananas coming from one pair thus depend
on the angle between the peeling directions used. This is certainly odd but one
could still imagine that our bananas are somehow pre-programmed to respond
differently to different peelings and that the set of pre-programmed responses
is different for the two bananas in one pair. What Mermin’s Bell inequality

10 In Mermin’s (1981, p. 86) example, there is a perfect (positive) correlation in runs in

which the two parties use the same setting and an imperfect anti-correlation in runs in
which they use different settings (see also Mermin, 1988, pp. 135–136). To get Mermin’s
original example, we should have used our pairs of bananas to represent entangled pairs of
photons and let “peel and taste bananas using different peeling directions” stand for “measure
the polarization of these photons along different axes”. We got our variation on Mermin’s
example by having pairs of bananas represent pairs of spin- 12 particles entangled in the
singlet state and letting “peel and taste bananas using different peeling directions” stand for
“measure spin components of these particles along different axes” (see Section 2.6).
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
 As I recalled what bright and beautiful beings Wildacre and his children
had been at one time, and realised that this broken wreck of a boy was all
that was left of the once brilliant trio, a wave of misery at the pity of it all
swept over my soul. I thought of Wildacre as he used to be in the old boyish
days, and then of Frank and Fay when they first came to the Rectory after
their father's death: and I felt that I was face to face with the hopeless
tragedy of what might have been but was not, because the folly and sin of
man frustrated the Wisdom and Righteousness of God, as for some hidden
reason it has been permitted to do ever since the forbidden tree was planted
in the midst of the garden.

And that is how the last of the Wildacres came to Restham.

For some days I saw but little of Frank. Ponty took him into her tender
keeping and set about nursing him back to health, only allowing him to
come downstairs and lie on the Chesterfield couch by the hall fire for a few
hours every day. It was astonishing to me to find Ponty so good to Frank.
She had always resented his presence at Restham even before he had
worked any mischief there: yet now she took him into her charge, and
nursed him as devotedly as if she had been his mother.

I remarked upon this change of front one day. "I am surprised you are so
kind to Mr. Wildacre, Ponty, considering how angry you were when first I
asked him to come and live at the Manor. I was afraid you wouldn't like his
coming back in this way."

"Well, you see, Master Reggie, when I was that set against his coming to
the Manor, he was strong and well, and so could stand up to me, as you
might say: but now he is too weak and ill to hurt a fly. There's lots of folks
as you can't stand at any price when they are able to stick up for themselves:
but when they are knocked down you'd do anything you could to help them
to get up again."

"Women are made like that—thank God!" I said.

"I remember there was a girl at Poppenhall who'd had a fine upstanding
young man after her for years and years, and she couldn't so much as look
at him, though all the other girls envied her for having such a handsome
beau: but he lost an arm and got his face scarred in an accident down a coal-
pit, and then she married him at once, and spent the rest of her life in
looking after him and trying to take the place of his lost arm."

"A woman all over!" I remarked.

"And all the same, Master Reggie, I'm not such a woman as you seem to
think—though I dare say I'm as weak as most of them if I'm taken the right
way: but it was one thing to have Mr. Wildacre here when I felt it in my
bones that he'd come between you and her dear young ladyship, and quite
another to have him here when there is nobody to come between. It wasn't
that I objected to Mr. Wildacre himself—far from it—any more than I
objected to Miss Annabel, whom I'd had from a month old: but what I did
say—and always shall say—is that it's best for married people to fight
things out for themselves, without having any relations on either side to
back them up. And I shall stick to this till my dying day, even if I was to
hang for it!"

I had no intention of hanging my old nurse when she talked in this strain,
but I had every objection to listening to her. So I closed the conversation by
going out of the nursery.

Annabel came over to see Frank a few days after his arrival at Restham:
but Ponty, who was paramount in the sick room, forbade her entrance. I had
already perceived that my sister's despotic sway at the Manor was gradually
being undermined, in secret and insidious ways, by the redoubtable Ponty,
whenever a suitable opportunity presented itself.

"I'm not going to let Miss Annabel see Mr. Wildacre till he is stronger,"
my old nurse said: "she's no good in a sick room isn't Miss Annabel, being
far too managing and interfering for invalids. And after all that poor young
gentleman has gone through, it would be heathen cruelty to upset him still
worse. Miss Annabel on the top of the Germans would be too much for
anybody!"

"But Miss Annabel, as you call her, used to be so fond of Mr. Wildacre,"
I pleaded.
 "Not after he crossed her will and ran off with her ladyship. You could
put on the top of a threepenny-bit all Miss Annabel's love for them as don't
do exactly as she tells them, and have room to spare. If she is as fond of Mr.
Wildacre as she used to be, she can go on with it as soon as he is strong
again, and able to stand her domineering ways; though there won't be much
fondness to go on with, if I know Miss Annabel. But as long as he's ill, and
in my charge, I can't have him bothered with nobody—not even with Deans
and Chapters and all other dignities of the Church, including Miss Annabel.
And so I tell you straight, Master Reggie."

And Ponty had her way, having found a secret supporter in my humble
self.

As Frank under Ponty's care grew stronger, I saw more of him, and we
gradually got into the way of talking naturally about my lost darling. He
could not bear even yet to say much about his awful experiences during that
terrible time at Louvain; but he repeated the story of how Fay had given her
life to save another's after risking it for some time in order to tend the sick
and wounded. And that made me love her all the more dearly, and mourn
her all the more deeply.

"I don't want to bother you, Reggie," he said one day, when relations had
grown less strained between us; "but I just want you to know how
dreadfully sorry I am that I behaved as I did. Lady Chayford told me that
you couldn't forgive me, and I feel I haven't the right to ask you to forgive
me. But I just want to tell you that I am sorry, and that I would give my life
to undo what I did."

He was lying in his usual place on the couch, and I was sitting in an
easy-chair on the other side of the great fire-place. For a few seconds I
smoked in silence: then I said: "I hope you understand it isn't that I won't
forgive you, Frank, but that I can't. I've tried, and I find it impossible."

Frank nodded his head in the way that reminded me so keenly of Fay. "I
know: Lady Chayford told me. And she also told me how not forgiving me
had made you lose your wonderful gift of healing. It is dreadful to think that
I had power to spoil your life as much as that!"
 I smiled sadly at the childishness which made the loss of my healing
powers seem greater than the loss of Fay. And then my smile faded as I
realised that it is only when we speak as little children that we speak truth;
for the loss of my healing powers stood sacramentally for more than even
the loss of my wife. It was the outward and visible sign of my separation
from God.

"I know it's no good saying I'm sorry now, but I must say it," Frank
continued; "and I shall go on feeling it as long as I live. I don't really see
how you could forgive me: I know I couldn't if I were in your place. In fact,
I shouldn't even want to."

"I do want to," I said slowly; "but I can't."

"But although I own I did my best towards the end to induce Fay to
come away with me," continued Frank, in that throaty and rather husky
voice which was so like Fay's that sometimes it thrilled my heart-strings to
breaking-point, "I can't help saying that she oughtn't to have listened to me.
After all, she was bound to you by vows, and I wasn't."

I lifted up my hand in protest. "Hush, hush!" I said sternly: "I cannot

allow you or anybody else to dare to say a word against my wife."

"You are very loyal to her," he replied, after a short pause, in which I did
him the justice to believe that he felt ashamed of himself.

"I loved her," I said. Then I corrected myself: "I mean I love her."

But it was not easy to suppress a Wildacre even when he did feel
ashamed of himself. "Then you have forgiven her," said Frank: "Lady
Chayford told me you hadn't."

There was a few minutes' silence whilst I tried to be honest with Frank
and with myself. Then I said slowly: "I don't believe I really did forgive her
altogether till I heard of her death, though I loved her all the time more than
I loved life itself. But after she died I gradually realised that there was
nothing to forgive. I had been weighed in her balance, and had been found
wanting, and she had no further use for me: therefore she threw me on one
side as worthless. I was hers to do what she liked with, and she had a
perfect right to retain or to reject me as she thought fit. But, mind you, I
didn't see this at first. I am no better than my neighbours, and for a long
time I was as harsh and bitter and vindictive as any poor beggar of the so-
called 'criminal classes' could have been in the circumstances. It is only
since Fay's death that I have realised that she was justified in the course she
took."

"But she wasn't——" Frank began; but I stopped him.

"No, no! Say what you like about yourself, my boy, but not a word
against Fay. And don't think that because I completely exonerate her I also
exonerate you. For I don't. Whatever lay between her and me, was sacred to
her and me, and no one had any right to intermeddle in it. Neither had you
nor anybody else a right to try to put asunder those whom God had joined
together: and that—unless I do you a grave injustice—is what you did."

Frank pondered on my words for a short time and then he said: "To a
certain extent, perhaps, I did come between you and Fay, and, as I have told
you, I repent of what I did in dust and ashes. But I never meant to come
between you. On that score my conscience is clear. What I did do was to
persuade her to come away with me: but I never did that until something or
somebody had already come between you and her, and I saw she was
fretting her life out because of it."

I was startled. "Something had already come between us! What in

Heaven's name do you mean?"

"It is rather difficult to explain, Reggie," replied Frank, carefully

weighing his words in his endeavour to be lucid: "yet I think I must try to
do so even if I make a hash of it, because at present you are absolutely in
the dark about the whole affair. As far as I can make out, you think that Fay
went away because she didn't love you enough."

"That certainly was my impression," I said, trying in vain to keep the

pain out of my voice.
 "Well, then, you are off on a wrong scent altogether. Fay went away
because she loved you too much."

"Loved me too much! I don't understand." I was dazed by Frank's

incomprehensible burst of confidence.

He did his best to make matters clearer. No Wildacre was ever at a loss
for words. "You see, it was in this way: Fay absolutely adored you—simply
worshipped the ground you walked on. I'm not justifying her for feeling like
this," he added, with the first touch of his old whimsicalness that he had
shown since his return; "I don't deny that it was very foolish of her to set up
any man as a god and worship him like that: but that is what she did; and it
is right for you to know it, before you judge her for what she did besides."

"I shall never judge her," I interpolated; "God forbid!"

"Well, then, before you understand what she did, if you prefer the word.
It really was Fay's absorbing and unreasoning adoration of you that upset
the apple-cart and did all the mischief. If she'd been more sensible and
discriminating, all this trouble would never have happened: but she was
young and foolish, and madly in love at that. And she was so wild with
jealousy, because she thought you loved your sister more than you loved
her, that she hardly knew what she was doing."

"I thought she found me old and dull and tiresome," I murmured.

"I know you did, and that really was too idiotic for anything! Why, she
was simply crazy for love of you from the first time she saw you till the day
she ran away; but you footled the whole thing! I'm sorry to say it, Reggie,
but you really did."

Amazement had rendered me humble. I realised that if any one had

known Fay thoroughly, Frank had; and it was as an expert that he spoke.
"Please explain," I said meekly.

Nothing loth, he continued: "Well, if you want the truth, you shall have
it. And of course you must bear in mind that, if Fay hadn't been so
ridiculously in love, silly little things wouldn't have hurt her as they did,
and she wouldn't have gone off her head with jealousy of Miss Kingsnorth.
I know men like to feel that their wives are very much in love with them:
but the wives who aren't so much in love are really the best for everyday
wear. They are more tolerant and much less exacting."

Frank was a wiser man than he had been when he left Restham. I noted
that. And for the first time a tiny doubt crept into my mind as to whether
even then he had been the most unwise man there.

"In the first place," he went on, "Fay was most frightfully upset at your
asking Miss Kingsnorth to stay on living with you after you were married.
That started the feeling."

"I thought that as Fay was still such a child it would be a comfort to her
to have a kind and loving woman to turn to and lean upon," I explained.

"Kind and loving fiddlesticks!" retorted Frank, by no means respectfully;

but I was so glad to see him once more a little like his old self that I
rejoiced in rather than resented his impertinence. In spite of my underlying
enmity against him, I could not hide it from myself that Frank had attracted
and fascinated me since his return as he had never attracted and fascinated
me before: and this in spite of the fact that his good looks were faded, and
his brilliance was quenched. "When girls are first married they don't want
kind and loving women to lean upon: they want to lean upon the husbands
whose business it is to be leant upon. And they hate anybody who comes
between them and their husbands."

"But remember, Frank, I asked you to live with us as well as Annabel. It

isn't as if I had asked my sister, and left my wife's brother out." I appeared
to be exculpating myself to Frank; but in reality I was exculpating myself to
myself.

"But that only made the matter worse. Fay didn't want me any more than
she wanted Miss Kingsnorth to come poking my nose in between you and
her. She wanted you to herself."

"I'm afraid that she and Annabel did not get on together as well as I had
hoped," I said.
 Frank shrugged his thin shoulders. "They'd have got on all right together
in their proper places. Fay was quite fond of Miss Kingsnorth as a sister-in-
law: but when she found Miss Kingsnorth put in place of her husband, why
of course she kicked. Anybody would."

"Annabel wasn't put in place of her husband," I argued.

"Yes, she was; and of course the thing didn't work. You seemed to have
an idea that Fay's love was transferable, like a ticket for a concert, and that
if you didn't use it your sister could. But it's no good trying to transfer other
people's affections any more than it's any use trying to change other
people's religions. You can take the old one away, but you can't give them a
new one in its place."

"But I never attempted to do such a ridiculous thing," I argued.

But Frank was firm. "Yes, you did. Or, at any rate, Fay thought you did,
which comes to the same thing as far as she was concerned, and that was
what made her so mad. For instance, when she particularly asked you to
give her a Prayer Book with her name written in it by you, so that religion
and you might all get mixed up together in her mind, and you be part of
religion and religion part of you, what did you do? You got Miss Kingsnorth
to give her the Prayer Book, so that Miss Kingsnorth should become part of
her religion instead of you! Now it really was absurd to expect Miss
Kingsnorth—I beg her pardon, I mean Mrs. Blathwayte—to become part of
anybody's religion, except of old Blathwayte's—I mean the Dean's. I
suppose she's part of his religion now, right enough. But she wasn't the kind
of person to be ever part of Fay's religion, and I should have thought you
could have seen that for yourself."

"Did Fay tell you that about the Prayer Book?" I asked, with a stab of
anguish. It was incomprehensible to me how my darling could have
discussed, even with her brother, things which lay entirely between her and
me. I could never have talked to Annabel about matters which concerned
Fay and myself alone! I should have regarded them as too sacred. But that
is where men and women are so different from each other, and where
women are so much less reserved than men. I believe that good wives tell
more about their husbands than bad husbands ever tell about their wives.
 But good Heavens, how it hurt!

"Yes," replied Frank, quite unconscious of my pain, "she told me

everything. And it was only after she had told me everything, and I saw
how miserable you were making her by setting Miss Kingsnorth above and
before her that I began to urge her to run away and begin life over again. Of
course I see now it was wicked of me to do so, although I was so furious
with you for thinking more of your sister than of your wife; and besides
being wicked, it was useless. Fay loved you so much that being away from
you didn't seem to mend matters at all, but only to make them worse. But I
thought that when once she'd got away from you and your treatment of her,
she'd begin to forget you, and be happy again as she was before she and you
had ever met. But unfortunately I was wrong."

I groaned. I couldn't help it.

"Then another time," Frank went on, the Wildacres never having been
denied freedom of utterance, "she was almost mad with joy because you
came all the way from Restham to Liverpool Street to meet her on her way
home from Bythesea. It looked as if you really were as much in love with
her as she was with you. And then you went and spoilt it all by saying that
you had come to please your sister. Now, I ask you, what wife could stand
that? I'm sure you wouldn't have liked to feel that Fay married you in order
to please me: and in the same way she didn't like to feel that you had
married her to please Mrs. Blathwayte."

"But it was absurd of her to feel like that! She must have known that I
worshipped the very ground she walked on, and that the only fly in my
ointment was that I felt I was too old and dull to make her happy."

Frank still had me on the hip. "Then that was equally absurd of you! Fay
wasn't the only absurd one apparently. You see all the time that you were
inventing trouble by thinking that you were too old and dull for her, she was
inventing trouble by thinking that she was too young and silly for you, and
that you were comparing her with your sister, and finding her inferior. And
you know how mad a woman gets when she thinks her husband likes
anybody else more than he likes her. There's nothing she wouldn't do to
punish him and hurt herself at the same time! And that is how Fay got. She
was so wild at finding you thought more of Miss Kingsnorth than you did
of her, that she didn't care what happened. She thought you despised her,
and that simply finished her off altogether. And when she was unhappy she
tried to drown her unhappiness in theatricals and fallals of that kind, which
didn't really do her the slightest good: but when husbands fail, women set
up all sorts of ridiculous scarecrows in their place. It's the way they're
made, I suppose. And when the theatricals turned out to be no good in
helping her to forget, she took to travelling, and that was how we came to
be in Belgium when the war broke out. But travelling didn't really help her
either, though she had an idea that the old cities of Flanders might be rather
soothing. But as things panned out they were quite the reverse, and we'd far
better have remained in Australia!"

"It is all incredible to me," I said.

But Frank had no mercy. "The long and the short of it is you were so
busy worrying yourself about the relations between Fay and your sister, that
you let the relations between Fay and yourself slide. And that was really the
only thing that mattered. Then Fay got it into her head that you regretted
having married her when you compared her with Miss Kingsnorth and saw
how young and silly she was in comparison: and so she decided to leave
you and your sister once more alone together, as she believed that that was
what really could make you happy. And even now I can't help admitting that
Miss Kingsnorth is far more your sort than Fay was."

I was silent for a time. The solid earth seemed slipping away beneath my
feet. Then I said: "Do you mean to tell me, on your word of honour, that to
the best of your belief neither you nor Annabel tried to come between my
wife and me?"

Without hesitation the answer came: "Certainly I do. I am positive that I

never did, and in my own mind I am equally certain that Mrs. Blathwayte
never did either. But where I was to blame was that when I saw matters had
gone wrong, I tried to set them right in my own way: and I think probably
that is what Mrs. Blathwayte tried to do also. But there was some excuse for
us. The happiness of her brother and my sister mattered more to us than
anything else in the world. Of course I see now that you asked Miss
Kingsnorth here on Fay's account, though it was a ridiculous thing to do:
but I own now you did it from a right motive. But Fay believed you did it
because you thought you would find her too young and silly to be enough
for you by herself, and so you wanted your sister and me to relieve the
tedium, and make things more cheerful for you. That was Fay's idea, and I
agreed with her. And naturally I resented your putting your sister before
mine. Any fellow would."

"I never meant to."

"But you did. And it is for what we do that we are punished—not for
what we meant to do. It is a way of yours to mix up essentials with non-
essentials, and I expect always will be: I suppose you are made like that,
and can't help it. But if you'd only realised that the important thing was not
how Fay and Miss Kingsnorth got on together, but how Fay and you got on
together, all this misery would never have happened."

I felt I could bear no more: so I went out alone into the autumn dusk to
commune with my own soul on the revelations which Frank had vouchsafed
to me. And when we met again, we did not refer to it, but talked only on
indifferent things. For the boy not only knew when to speak: with a wisdom
beyond his years he knew also when to be silent.

For several days I continued to commune with my own soul on the

matters which Frank had revealed to me. And as I did so the conviction
gradually took hold of me that I had been right in my ruthless decision that
as long as I lived I could never forgive the man who had come between my
wife and me: who had left my house unto me desolate, and had driven forth
my darling to her death.

And then wherever I went I heard nothing but one awful message: the
dying leaves whispered it, the dropping rain repeated it, and the autumn
winds thundered it in my ears: the message which long ago struck terror and
remorse to the heart of a great King struck terror and remorse also to mine.
Wherever I went and whatever I did I kept hearing the appalling word of
condemnation: "Thou art the man."
 CHAPTER XXIII

THE PEACE OF GOD

I awoke one morning with a strange feeling that something wonderful

had happened during the night: and as my mind gradually cleared, I realised
what that something was.

I had forgiven Frank Wildacre.

Or, rather, I had come to the knowledge that there was nothing to
forgive: that the man whose insensate folly had spoilt my life and Fay's was
not Frank at all, but myself.

But the result was the same. After nearly three years of the outer
darkness I had come once more into the light: I was at peace with Man and
therefore with God: and that seemed to be all that signified.

On myself I had no mercy. I could not forgive myself—I cannot forgive

myself now—I never shall forgive myself. But that was a matter of no
moment. Self-pardon is never the way of salvation. I knew—how I knew I
cannot tell, but I did know it—that God had forgiven me: I believed from
the depths of my heart that Fay, with the more perfect comprehension of
those who are already on the Other Side, had forgiven me also: therefore
my self-condemnation was no bar across the path of life, but rather a
healthy and permanent discipline of the soul.

With a joy beyond all earthly joy I rose and dressed and went out into the
hazy autumn morning. It was Sunday: and as I stood in the grey mist which
still lay over everything and which shrouded the garden and the fields from
my view, I heard the church-bell ringing for the eight o'clock Celebration.
And for the first time for more than two years that bell called to me, and
bade me come and take my place at the Eucharistic Feast: for at last I was
in love and charity with all men, and intended to lead a new life.
 I answered the Call and entered the Church which was hallowed by the
worship of centuries: and there I made my confession to Almighty God,
meekly kneeling upon my knees, as the pilgrims had knelt there ages and
ages before me. And as in lowly adoration I partook of the Blessed Food
Which Christ Himself had ordained, I thereby received Him into my heart
by faith: and the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, once more
filled my heart and mind with the knowledge and love of God and of His
Son, Jesus Christ.

And so I began life over again in that autumn morning in Restham

Church, at the beginning of the Great War.

I did not see Frank when I came home after the Service was over, as he
never came down to breakfast: but as I sat at my solitary meal I knew no
loneliness: the glory of the Great Reconciliation was about me still.

After breakfast Jeavons came to me in a somewhat deprecating manner.

"I am sorry to trouble you, Sir Reginald," he began, "and I told Maggie
Pearson so, but she wouldn't take no, and begged me to come and give you
her message."

Maggie Pearson was the daughter of one of my keepers—a respectable

man with a tidy wife and a large family.

"And what was her message?" I asked.

Jeavons still appeared confused. "I really did my best, Sir Reginald, to
make her understand that you'd given up all that sort of thing and never
went in for it now, finding it more or less uncertain, as you might say, and
out of the usual course of events, and so not altogether to be depended
upon; and that she'd much better stick to the doctor and not trouble you, Mr.
Wildacre being laid up in the house, and you with enough on your hands as
it is. But she went on crying, and said her mother'd never forgive her if she
didn't give you the message."

I felt that such unaccustomed loquacity was a sign of serious mental

disturbance on the part of Jeavons. He was generally so very brief and to
the point.

"Well, what was the message?" I repeated, with (I cannot help thinking)
commendable patience.

"Well, Sir Reginald, begging your pardon, the fact is that Mrs. Pearson's
baby is dying of brownchitis or pewmonia or some other disease connected
with its teething, and nothing will satisfy her but that you should come and
lay your hands on it, like as was your custom at one time, having outgrown
it since. I told Maggie as how you had given up the habit long ago, which
she said her mother knew: but all the same, Mrs. Pearson still persisted that
she was sure you could cure the baby if you tried, which was just like her
obstinacy, and to my thinking a great impertinence."

"Have they had the doctor, do you know?" I asked.

"Yes, Sir Reginald, and he can't do nothing more than what he has done,
he says, and he is afraid the child will die. Though what they wants with
that extra child at all, beats me, having six besides, and none too much food
for them all, with the dreadful war sending up the prices of everything."

For two years now I had refused all the villagers' requests that I would
exercise my gift of healing upon them, as I knew, alas! that the gift was no
longer mine: and they had gradually ceased to proffer these requests.
Therefore it struck me as noteworthy that on the very day when, as the old
theologists put it, I had "found peace," I should be asked to exercise this lost
power once more. It seemed to be one of those wonderful instances of
direct Interposition which we of this faithless and perverse generation
disguise under the pseudonym of "remarkable coincidences."

"Tell Maggie that I will come at once," I said.

And Jeavons accordingly departed, leaving behind him an atmosphere of

respectful disapproval and regret. Anything bordering on the unusual—let
alone the miraculous—filled my excellent butler with horror and dismay.

When I am tempted—as indeed I often am, and frequently successfully

—to despise those Jeavons-like souls who delight to burrow in the
commonplace whenever the light of the supernatural shows above the
horizon, I remind myself of the first Order that was given after the dread
gates of death had been flung open and the ruler's little daughter had come
through them back to life. He Who had performed the stupendous miracle
did not take this unique opportunity of preaching a sermon to the company
assembled in the house of mourning, with His Own Action as the text: on
the contrary "He commanded that something should be given her to eat."

How joyfully those who had laughed Him to scorn when He contradicted
their conventional assumption that death was the final ending—laughed,
doubtless with the uncomfortable, mocking laughter of all materially
minded people when confronted with things undreamed of in their smug
philosophy—must have hurried to lay the table and prepare the meal, and
perform all the trivial little duties which form the essence of the normal and
the commonplace. How relieved they must have felt to find themselves
once more in the ordinary routine of everyday existence!

And I like to think that it was then His turn to smile—He Who knew
them so well, and remembered that they were but dust; yet the dust wherein
He had clothed Himself in order to identify Himself with them. But I am
sure that in His smile there was no scorn. He knew what they needed, and
He supplied all their need.

Obedient to the Call which had come to me, I went through the village,
hardly conscious of any volition on my own part. I had merged my will in
another's, and had no longer any desire to act on my own initiative. It is a
strange feeling, this absolute surrender of self, and brings with it that peace
which the world can never give nor take away.

Still as in a dream I entered the cottage at the far end of the village, and
found Mrs. Pearson rocking in her arms her dying child; the other children
hanging round, all more or less in a state of tears.

"Good-morning, Mrs. Pearson," I said, when Maggie had ushered me

into the midst of the weeping group. "I have come because you sent for
me."
 "And right thankful I am to you, Sir Reginald," replied the poor woman:
"I says to myself, when the doctor give my baby up, 'If anybody can save
her, Sir Reginald can.'"

"I will do what I can," I said, "but it is years now since I have had the
power to heal anybody. I lost it when her ladyship went away."

"So I've heard, Sir Reginald. But I minded that story of the woman who
wouldn't take 'No' even from the Blessed Lord Himself, but begged for just
the crumbs under the table: and her child was healed in consequence."

I knelt down beside the rocking-chair, and laid my hands upon the little
form lying on the mother's lap, at the same time lifting up my whole soul in
prayer. And straightway the answer came—as in my heart of hearts I had
known it would come. Like a mighty electrical force the healing power
rushed through me to the child. I could feel it in every vein and every fibre
of my body. And at the same time my consciousness of the Presence of
Christ was so acute that it was almost as if I actually saw and heard and felt
Him close beside me.

Whilst I prayed the moaning of the child ceased, and its laboured
breathing grew gradually soft and easy: and when I rose from my knees and
looked at it, I knew that it would live.

The poor mother clung to my hand, and wept tears of gratitude. But I
told her—as I always made a point of telling those whom I was permitted to
help—that her thanksgivings were not due to me, but to Another Whose
messenger for the time I was allowed to be: and then I hurried back through
the village to the Church, there to render thanks, with the rest of the
congregation at the office of Matins, for the blessings that had (in my case
so wonderfully) been vouchsafed to me.

When I returned home after the morning service, I found Frank dressed
and downstairs: but it was not until lunch was over and we had settled down
in our usual places—he on the Chesterfield on one side of the hall fire, and
I in my easy-chair on the other—that I found an opportunity of telling him,
without fear of interruption, of the marvellous thing that had happened to
me.
 "Frank, my boy, I have something to say to you," I began.

"Yes, Reggie, what is it?"

"To me it is so wonderful that I find difficulty in putting it into words.

But though I may be slow to speak, you are always swift to hear, so I dare
say you will understand in spite of my blundering way of telling it."

"Fire away," said Frank encouragingly. "I shall catch on right enough,
never fear."

"Well, first and foremost, I want you to know that I have forgiven you
completely for any share that you may have had in helping Fay to leave
me."

Frank gave a little cry of joy. "Oh, Reggie, how splendid of you!" he
began.

But I lifted up my hand to stop him. "Wait a bit, my boy. Please hear all I
have got to say before you cut in. I was going to tell you that I forgave you
freely because I had found that there was nothing to forgive. It sounds
rather Irish, I know: but I think you will understand that we are obliged to
forgive people when we think they have injured us, even when we find they
haven't really injured us at all. I mean we are bound to get back into love
and charity with them, whether the lapse from love and charity was their
fault or ours."

Frank nodded his head in the way that reminded me so of Fay. "I know
exactly what you are driving at. When we quarrel with anybody we've got
to bury the hatchet before we can be happy or good again: and the original
ownership of the hatchet has no effect whatever upon the importance of the
funeral."

"Precisely so. I'd got to forgive you whether you'd done anything
needing forgiveness or not: because I believed you had, and acted according
to that belief. Therefore it was imperative upon me to root the bitterness
towards you out of my heart: the fact that the bitterness to a great extent
was undeserved, did not altogether rob it of its flavour. Well, then, that is
the first thing: I want you to know that at last I am at peace with you after
nearly three years of hot anger against you: whether you in any way
deserved that anger, is your affair not mine."

Here Frank's enforced silence broke down. "I didn't deserve it as much
as you thought, but I did deserve it a bit. I never tried to set Fay against you:
but when I saw she was set against you, I induced her to cut and run,
instead of using my influence to make her see things in a different light, and
to bring you and her together again. After all is said and done, you were her
husband: and when I saw the bond between you was loosening I ought to
have helped to tie it tight again instead of undoing it altogether. Let's try to
be just all round!"

"I am trying to be just," I replied: "and therefore I admit that though I

myself was the principal culprit, you were not altogether free from blame."

"No, I wasn't. Neither was Fay, when you come to that, though I know
you won't let me say so."

"Certainly I won't: so don't try it on. Let us pass on to the next thing.
And that is that as I have forgiven you, so God has forgiven me, and has
restored to me my power of healing."

"Oh, Reggie, is that really true? I minded that more than anything!"
Frank's voice was hoarse with emotion and his language was confused: but
I understood him right enough.

"Yes: I was instrumental in healing Mrs. Pearson's baby this morning;

the first time that I have been permitted to do such a thing since Fay went
away." Then I changed the subject hastily, with that shyness which all
Englishmen feel when speaking about the matters that concern their own
souls. "And there is yet another thing I want to say; that is to ask you to
make your permanent home with me here. You can go over and visit your
relations in Australia as often as you like; but I want you to feel that this is
your real home. I have been very lonely ever since Fay went away. I was
going to add, 'and ever since Annabel was married,' but candidly I don't
think that really made much difference. When the worst has happened,
minor troubles don't count. But you seem almost part of Fay—a sort of
legacy that she has left me, because she loved us both: and I feel that it
would please her if we devoted the rest of our lives to taking care of each
other."

Frank was trying so hard to choke back his sob that he could not speak.
He was still very weak after his awful experiences in Belgium. So I went
on, order to give him time to recover himself.

"I think we shall be happy together, my boy, in a second-rate sort of way;

but we can never be really perfectly happy until we see Fay again. At least I
know I can't. But that is the worst of wrong-doing, or of any infringement
of the great law of Love." I still continued talking, seeing that the boy was
not yet master of himself: "We repent our wrong-doing, and God forgives
us, and we know it will all come right again some day: but not here, or now.
Between us you and I managed to spoil Fay's life; and no repentance of ours
will set that right in this life, nor undo the harm that we (however
unconsciously) wrought. There is no bringing the shadow on the dial ten
degrees backward. We may pretend to ourselves that there is, but there isn't
really. God still performs many miracles, but not that one. Of course He
could if He so willed it, but He certainly doesn't; and so what is done is
done, and what is past is past, and it is only left to us to bear with God's
help the consequences of our own misdeeds."

To my surprise the usually undemonstrative Frank sprang up from the

couch where he was lying, and flung himself on his knees beside my chair,
at the same time throwing his thin arms round my neck. "Yes, Reggie, He
can," he gasped between his sobs: "He can and He will and He does."

I turned my head in surprise, and for the first time since Frank's return to
Restham, I saw his face within close range of my short-sighted eyes. For a
moment I was literally paralysed with amazement, and my heart and pulses
seemed to stand still and then to rush on in a very delirium of unheard-of
joy. For the face into which I looked at such close quarters—the face
quivering with emotion and disfigured with tears, and yet to me the dearest
and most beautiful face in the whole world—was not Frank's at all—but
Fay's!
 CHAPTER XXIV

CONCLUSION

This then is the story of the drama of my life; the story of how in my
case the greatest miracle of all was accomplished, and the shadow on the
dial was brought ten degrees backward. She who had been dead was alive
again, she who had been lost was found. The past was given back to me to
be lived over again, with its misdeeds expiated and its mistakes retrieved.

I learnt from my darling that the greater part of what she had told me
was absolutely true; only that it was Frank who gave his life to save the
child that was playing in the sun when the shells began to fall in that
doomed street of Louvain—not Fay.

So Frank Wildacre died the death of a hero: for there is no more glorious
death for any man than to give his life for another's. Again it struck me
afresh, as it had often struck me before, how since the beginning of the
Great War the prophecy had been literally fulfilled that the last should be
first, and the first last. Frank, who had been thoughtless and irresponsible
and frivolous, had been called to lay down his life for one of those little
ones whose angels do always behold the Face of the Father: whilst I, who
had taken the world so seriously, and had ever longed to do great deeds and
think high thoughts, was left amongst the useless ones at home. Yet we
were all part of the great army of the living God, and it was not for us to
pick and choose who should go forth with the hosts and who should stay at
home by the stuff. That was all left in the Hands of "Our Captain, Christ,
under Whose colours we had fought so long."

Frank only lived for about an hour after he was hit. They managed to
carry him into a house, but there was no hope from the first. He was
conscious almost to the end; and he devoted those last moments to careful
thought for his sister. He told her to cut off her long hair and dress herself
up in his clothes, and try to get away to England as soon as she could, as it
was not safe for her to remain in Belgium now that he was no longer there
to take care of her: and as terrible and ghastly rumours were already current
as to the unspeakable way in which the ruthless invaders were treating such
women as were hapless enough to fall into their hands, he thought Fay
would be safer if her sex were not known. And so he fell on sleep.

As soon as Frank had passed to his well-earned reward, Fay followed out
all his instructions to the letter, and succeeded, after many vicissitudes, in
escaping to England with a crowd of Belgian refugees. No one penetrated
her disguise—not even Isabel Chayford, who put down Fay's extraordinary
likeness to her own self to the fact that she and Frank were twins, and so
were expected to resemble one another. And Fay kept to her own room most
of the time that she was at the Chayfords', for fear Isabel should discover
her identity. Ponty found her out at once: there was never any deceiving
Ponty! But Fay could always twist my old nurse round her little finger, and
therefore Ponty kept her secret for her.

To this hour I cannot conceive how I could have been such a fool as not
to know my darling the moment I set eyes on her. But the grim fact remains
that I am by nature a fool, and this was one of the occasions of my
displaying my folly. My one excuse—and a feeble one it is!—is my
extreme short-sightedness: the first moment that Fay's dear face was close
to my own I recognised her like a shot: but lying in the Chesterfield on the
other side of the fire-place, with her short curly hair and elfin face, she
looked so like Frank that I took it for granted she was Frank; and she was so
much aged and changed, alas! by all she had suffered, that she had lost
much of her likeness to the Fay of the past. As to her voice, Frank's was so
high for a man's and hers was so deep for a woman's that I frequently had
mistaken the one for the other in the old days: so no wonder I did so now,
when I was convinced in my own mind that Fay was dead, and that Frank
was talking to me from the other side of the great fire-place.

I gathered that Fay's original idea was to find out whether or not I had
forgiven her. If I had, she meant to reveal herself to me and to ask me to
take her back as my wife: but if I had not forgiven her, she intended to
return to Australia, leaving me with the idea that she was dead and I was
free. A wild, childish scheme, just like my impracticable darling!

But when Isabel told her how deeply my anger against Frank had eaten
into my very soul, destroying my gift of healing and coming between me
and my God, Fay realised that there was far more at stake than just the
relations between herself and me. The salvation of my soul was hanging in
the balance, and it was for her dear hands to adjust the scales. With an
insight beyond her years, she understood that before I could find peace I
must forgive Frank, believing him to be alive: the easy forgiveness which
we accord to the dead, who can no longer hurt or be hurt by us, was not the
thing that was demanded of me. I was called upon to forgive Frank fully
and freely, even although I believed that it was through him that my darling
had gone to her death, and that therefore there was no possibility of her ever
coming back to me, or of the wrong which he had done me ever being
rectified.

This my darling enabled me to do, and thereby saved my soul alive.

And now we are once more all in all to each other; and the love that is
stronger than death can lighten even the long shadows cast by the Great
War.

I do not think there is any more to add to my story, save the interesting
fact that we have christened our first-born son Francis.

At present he finds his sole occupation in mewling and puking in his

nurse's arms; but his beloved mother and I have every reason to hope that
eventually he will learn to employ his time with more profit both to himself
and to the world at large.

I think that some day "Sir Francis Kingsnorth" will be quite an effective
name and sound very well indeed. But I shall not be there to hear it.
THE END
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