  Most working scientists hold fast to the concept of 'realism' - a viewpoint
according to which an external reality exists independent of observation. But
quantum physics has shattered some of our cornerstone beliefs. According to
Bell's theorem, any theory that is based on the joint assumption of realism and
locality (meaning that local events cannot be affected by actions in space-like
separated regions) is at variance with certain quantum predictions. Experiments
with entangled pairs of particles have amply confirmed these quantum
predictions, thus rendering local realistic theories untenable. Maintaining
realism as a fundamental concept would therefore necessitate the introduction
of 'spooky' actions that defy locality. Here we show by both theory and
experiment that a broad and rather reasonable class of such non-local realistic
theories is incompatible with experimentally observable quantum correlations.
In the experiment, we measure previously untested correlations between two
entangled photons, and show that these correlations violate an inequality
proposed by Leggett for non-local realistic theories. Our result suggests that
giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with
quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are
abandoned.
