  Aravind and Lee-Elkin (1997) gave a proof of the Bell-Kochen-Specker theorem
by showing that it is impossible to color the 60 directions from the center of
a 600-cell to its vertices in a certain way. This paper refines that result by
showing that the 60 directions contain many subsets of 36 and 30 directions
that cannot be similarly colored, and so provide more economical demonstrations
of the theorem. Further, these subsets are shown to be critical in the sense
that deleting even a single direction from any of them causes the proof to
fail. The critical sets of size 36 and 30 are shown to belong to orbits of 200
and 240 members, respectively, under the symmetries of the polytope. A
comparison is made between these critical sets and other such sets in four
dimensions, and the significance of these results is discussed.
