Principle of locality

“Frans van Luteren (1991), in his extensive... study of conceptions of gravity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, demonstrates that a quest for intelligibility was uppermost for several physicists who attempted [to challenge the absolute non-locality doctrine with] ether-type explanations for action-at-a-distance.”

“[L]ocality... reflects our ability to construct the "big picture" like a jigsaw puzzle, starting with a description of the most basic interactions among elementary particles.”

“In fact every theory in the history of physics before quantum theory was EPR-local. So the discovery that the world is not EPR-local (i.e. that any physical theory that makes accurate predictions cannot be EPR-local) would mark a radical break in the history of physics.”

“Descartes' objective was comprehensibility—to make the workings of nature completely transparent. Locality was essential to this goal. Objects interacted strictly locally: they moved in straight lines until they collided; only then did they change course. Like Democritus and Aristotle, Descartes offered no real evidence for this principle.”