The straw man of quantum physics

Abstract: The violation of Bell inequalities by experiment has convinced physicists that we cannot maintain a classical view of the world. When we argue against the possibility of local realist hidden-variable models, however, the ubiquitous requirement of realism, that "measurement results depend on pre-existing properties of objects that are independent of the measurement", reduces classical theory to a straw man. When our most successful physical theories have been field theories for well over a century, and probabilistic for almost as long, the proper comparison is between quantum fields and random fields, for which there are no sharply defined objects and no properties, so that realism is inapplicable. If we model quantum fluctuations explicitly, we can construct random field models as alternatives to quantum field models.