In 1952, John Bell saw the impossible done. Bell was a young physicist working in the particle accelerator division of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in England; he spent his days finding new and better ways to smash subatomic particles together at high speeds, turning energy directly into mass, and searching for the fundamental constituents of all matter.
But the impossible thing wasn’t in a particle accelerator. It was in a new paper by the American physicist David Bohm. Bohm’s paper proposed an entirely new way of understanding quantum physics—but that had been proven impossible 20 years before, by John von Neumann, the greatest mathematical genius alive. Searching Bohm’s paper for errors, Bell quickly realized that there were none. Bohm had clearly found another interpretation for the strange mathematics of quantum physics, despite von Neumann’s proof. How? Where had the mighty von Neumann gone wrong, and why hadn’t anyone seen it before Bohm?
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