- Bell, John S. Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum
Mechanics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1987]
1993. ISBN 0-521-52338-9.
- This volume collects most of Bell's papers on the
foundations and interpretation of quantum mechanics including, of
course, his discovery of “Bell's inequality”, which showed that no
local hidden variable theory can reproduce the statistical results of
quantum mechanics, setting the stage for the experimental confirmation
by Aspect and others of the fundamental non-locality of quantum
physics. Bell's interest in the pilot wave theories of de Broglie
and Bohm is reflected in a number of papers, and Bell's exposition of
these theories is clearer and more concise than anything I've read by
Bohm or Hiley. He goes on to show the strong similarities between the
pilot wave approach and the “many world interpretation” of Everett
and de Witt. An extra added treat is chapter 9, where Bell derives
special relativity entirely from Maxwell's equations and the Bohr
atom, along the lines of Fitzgerald, Larmor, Lorentz, and Poincaré,
arriving at the principle of relativity (which Einstein took as a
hypothesis) from the previously known laws of physics.
October 2004 