Bell's theorem

In the interview Shimony discusses his undergraduate years at Yale in mathematics and philosophy; influence of C. S. Peirce, A. N. Whitehead; reactions to Hume; studying under Robert Calhoun and Paul Weiss; the bases of Shimony's physical realism; Army service at Ft. Monmouth, 1953-55; physics Ph.D. at Princeton; reading EPR; interaction with Eugene Wigner; teaching and doing research on the philosophy of quantum mechanics at MIT in the 1960s; first reactions to Bell's 1965 paper; collaboration with J. F. Clauser, M. A. Horne, and R. Holt on tests of Bell's inequality; the 1970 Varenna summer school on Foundations of Quantum Mechanics; the researches on hidden variable theory and on quantum mechanics of von Neumann, G. Mackey, J. P. Vigier, C. Piron, J. M. Jauch, E. Specker, and S. Kochen; the metaphysical implications of quantum mechanics: potentiality and nonlocality; the search for non-linear modifications of quantum mechanics; neutron interferometry; interactions with C. Shull, A. Zeilinger, and D. Greenberger; devising measures of entanglement; plans for future research.

Clauser discusses his father's influence; early interest in electronics; undergraduate study in physics at California Institute of Technology in early 1960s; graduate study at Columbia University in the late 1960s; research on the Bell inequalities as a post-doc at University of California, Berkeley with C. H. Townes in the 1970s; collaboration with Abner Shimony and Michael H. Horne; atom interferometry and its possible applications; quantum mechanics and its conceptual problems.