discussion group amongst like-minded young physicists and bat a few of these issues around. If the contemporary climate couldn’t provide the stimulation they needed, they would try and reawaken a style of physics that they had all found so magnetic in the first place.
dynamics connected them pretty quickly through happy accidents rather than any forethought.
They very quickly found common ground on these foundation questions, and one topic that dominated their interests was Bell’s Theorem. It’s named after a physicist called John Bell from Northern Ireland who spent much of his career at CERN (the huge particle So they form the Fundamental Fysiks Group physics lab and accelerator outside Geneva). and start to build an internal momentum. Bell had been frustrated by the lack of serious Can you tell us a little bit about the nature of attention to the philosophical underpinnings the problems they were beginning to address to quantum theory, and firmly believed that – problems like Bell’s Theorem for example. these questions had not been settled by the The genesis of the group itself only really looks greats – the Einsteins and the Bohrs – and were very much still open. He found hugely clear in hindsight. The accidents of history creative ways to make philosophical questions and the quirks of individual biography took more amenable to testing in the laboratory a hand through a series of twists where they and formalize them in scientific terms. He did each kind of bumbled along to Berkeley and this very much on the side, joking later in life began to find one another. Once they were that he’d hoped his colleagues would never all in the Bay Area, it wasn’t hard for them to discover his unconventional leanings. In the gravitate towards one another – they shared similar interests and passions and small world course of all this he found a remarkable result that he published in 1964.