John Stewart Bell

John Stewart Bell ( born June 28, 1928 in Belfast, † October 1, 1990 in Geneva, Switzerland ) was an Irish physicist, after whom the Bell's inequality and Bell's spaceship paradox were named.

Life and work

He came from a poor background. With the help of scholarships and part-time jobs, he was able to attend secondary school and study physics later at the Queen's University of Belfast. In 1948, he earned a B.Sc. in experimental physics, a year later a degree in mathematical physics.

Initially he worked in the nuclear research at Harwell ( Oxfordshire ). There he received his doctorate in 1956. Subsequently, he worked on theoretical physics in Birmingham and at CERN. His wife, Mary, also a physicist, he married in 1954. Bell was particularly interested in since the announcement of the Bohm's quantum mechanics for the foundations of quantum physics.

When his most important discoveries are named after him and Stephen L. Adler and Roman Jackiw Adler Bell Jackiw anomaly and the famous Bell's inequality, which he derived in 1964. Bell thus showed, among other things, that any "reasonable" quantum theory with local hidden variables given by experiments makes testable statements that contradict the statements of quantum mechanics. Experiments that were carried out later to test Bell's inequality, to talk, in the context of the previously possible measurement accuracy, for quantum mechanics and quantum theories against local hidden variables.

The Bohmian mechanics, a quantum theory with hidden variables for which JS Bell has been used in numerous works, is not affected because of their nonlocality. In the opinion of J. S. Bells, which is not shared by all physicists, follows from Bell's inequality even that nature itself is not locally if the predictions of quantum mechanics apply.

Later, Bell worked mainly in the field of quantum field theory at CERN. In 1989 he received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics. He died in 1990 of a cerebral hemorrhage in Geneva shortly after he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Works (selection)

• Speakable and unspeakable in quantum mechanics ( collection of essays on the interpretation of quantum mechanics ) 1987
• A PCAC puzzle: π0 → γγ in the σ -model. In: Il Nuovo Cimento A, vol 60, 1969, p 47 ( Adler - Bell - Jackiw anomaly, together with Roman Jackiw ).
• Against the measurement. In: Physical leaves, 1992, p 267
• On the Problem of hidden variables in quantum mechanics. In: Reviews of Modern Physics, vol 1966, p 447