Editor's Note: Reprinted from How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival by David Kaiser. Copyright (c) 2011 by David Kaiser. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Click here to see a Scientific American video that explains quantum entanglement.
[from Chapter 2, pp. 25-38:]
The iconoclastic Irish physicist John S. Bell had long nursed a private disquietude with quantum mechanics. His physics teachers—first at Queen's University in his native Belfast during the late 1940s, and later at Birmingham University, where he pursued doctoral work in the mid-1950s—had shunned matters of interpretation. The "ask no questions" attitude frustrated Bell, who remained unconvinced that Niels Bohr had really vanquished the last of Einstein's critiques long ago and that there was nothing left to worry about. At one point in his undergraduate studies, his red shock of hair blazing, he even engaged in a shouting match with a beleaguered professor, calling him "dishonest" for trying to paper over genuine mysteries in the foundations, such as how to interpret the uncertainty principle. Certainly, Bell would grant, quantum mechanics worked impeccably "for all practical purposes," a phrase he found himself using so often that he coined the acronym, "FAPP." But wasn't there more to physics than FAPP? At the end of the day, after all the wavefunctions had been calculated and probabilities plotted, shouldn't quantum mechanics have something coherent to say about nature?