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Name of creator

John Stewart Bell (CERN Theory Division) and TH Secretariat

Biographical history

John Stewart Bell was an Irish physicist. He obtained a bachelor's degree in experimental physics from Queen's University of Belfast in 1948 and another in mathematical physics a year later. He completed a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Birmingham in 1956, specialising in nuclear physics and quantum field theory.

In 1949 he started his career at UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment. He moved to the CERN laboratory in November 1960. He worked almost exclusively on theoretical particle physics and on accelerator design, but found time to pursue a major avocation, investigating the foundations of quantum theory.

In 1964, after a year's leave from CERN that he spent at Stanford University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Brandeis University, he sent a paper entitled "On the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox" (November 1964) to the journal Physics. The journal was short-lived, but the paper became famous, outlining what is now known as Bell's theorem and laying the foundations for the modern field of quantum-information science.

This theorem is a "no-go theorem" that draws an important distinction between quantum mechanics and the world as described by classical mechanics particularly concerning quantum entanglement where two or more particles in a quantum state continue to be mutually dependent at large physical separations.

John Stewart Bell died in 1990.

Immediate source of acquisition or transfer

CERN Theory Department Secretariat, 2018