John Stewart Bell

John Stewart Bell (28 July 1928 to 1 October 1990) was a physicist from Northern Ireland and the originator of Bell's theorem, an important theorem in quantum physics regarding hidden-variable theories. He was born in Belfast to a working-class family, and although financial hardship meant that neither parent nor his three older siblings completed high school, he decided at the age of 11 to become a scientist and graduated from Belfast Technical High School at 16. At Queen's University of Belfast he obtained a bachelor's degree in experimental physics in 1948 and another in mathematical physics a year later, and he completed a doctorate in physics at the University of Birmingham in 1956, specialising in nuclear physics and quantum field theory. His career began at the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment near Harwell. In 2022 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for work on Bell inequalities.