An exchange on local beables

Dr. Bell's paper, “The Theory of Local Beables”, performs a valuable service in clarifying two fundamental concepts: namely, locality and physical reality. His clarification leads him to a fundamental and highly reasonable assumption, expressed in equation (2) of Sect. 2. He then attempts in Sect. 4 to prove inequality (16) as a consequence of his equation (2). Unfortunately, we believe that his proof is not correct. A counter-example shows that (16) does not follow from (2) alone. Our objections are not given in a spirit of skepticism, since (16) does follow from other reasonable assumptions of locality and physical reality. These assumptions were discussed in an earlier paper and will be reconsidered in this letter.