John Stewart Bell (28 June 1928 ?1 October 1990) was a physicist, and the originator of Bell's Theorem, one of the most important theorems in quantum physics. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and graduated in experimental physics at the Queen's University of Belfast, in 1948.

He went on to complete a PhD at the University of Birmingham, specialising in nuclear physics and quantum field theory. His career began with the British Atomic Energy Agency, in Malvern, Britain's, then Harwell Laboratory. After several years he moved to the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire).

Here he worked almost exclusively on theoretical particle physics and on accelerator design, but found time to pursue a major avocation, investigating the foundations of quantum theory. In 1964, after a year's leave from CERN that he spent at Stanford University, the University of Wisconsin?Madison and Brandeis University, he wrote a paper entitled "On the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox". In this work, he showed that carrying forward EPR's analysis permits one to derive the famous Bell's inequality.

This inequality, derived from certain assumptions, conflicts with the predictions of quantum theory. There is some disagreement regarding what Bell's inequality ?in conjunction with the EPR analysis ?can be said to imply.

Bell held that not only local hidden variables, but any and all local theoretical explanations must conflict with the predictions of quantum theory: "It is known that with Bohm's example of EPR correlations, involving particles with spin, there is an irreducible nonlocality." According to an alternative interpretation, not all local theories in general, but only local hidden variables theories (or "local realist" theories) have shown to be incompatible with the predictions of quantum theory.

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