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Quantum Milestones, 1964: John Stewart Bell Rings in New Era of Quantum Theory (2022)


In 1964, Bell showed that quantum physics predicts correlations that violate certain inequalities. The work implied that quantum mechanics is not compatible with locality, even if there were “hidden variables” not accounted for in quantum theory.

Even now, with the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to experimenters performing eponymous Bell tests, its singular role wresting concrete answers from nature about reality remains underappreciated. Occasionally, he ran into workplace colleagues he could debate, such as Franz Mandl at the Harwell Laboratory, the newly formed UK atomic research center where Bell worked in the late 1950s, and Josef-Maria Jauch at CERN, where he took a job in 1960. While von Neumann’s math was sound, Bell acknowledged, the proof was fatally flawed because it rested on a false assumption that the rules for quantum mechanics applied to hidden variables.

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