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Home »<br>Culture, history and society » History » John Bell and the most obscure journal in physics

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John Bell and the most obscure journal in physics

22 Jul 2026

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Bell’s theorem is one of the most significant results in quantum mechanics. So why, wonders Iulia Georgescu , did John Bell publish it in a little-known, short-lived journal called Physics?

Short life, big impact The journal Physics Physique Физика only existed from 1964 to 1968, having been set up and run by physicists Bernd Matthias and Philip Anderson. (Recreation of journal banner courtesy: Shutterstock/IOP Publishing)">

Short life, big impact The journal Physics Physique Физика only existed from 1964 to 1968, having been set up and run by physicists Bernd Matthias and Philip Anderson. (Recreation of journal banner courtesy: Shutterstock/IOP Publishing)

As I was strolling through Belfast’s Titanic Quarter last summer, I discovered with delight a road called Bell’s Theorem Crescent. It’s named in honour of the Belfast-born physicist John Bell, best known for his eponymous theorem. Despite not being as embedded in popular culture as Schrödinger’s cat, his theorem will certainly ring a bell (forgive the pun) with most physicists.

The story goes back to 1935 when Albert Einstein, Boris Podolski and Nathan Rosen (EPR) came up with their now-famous thought experiment, which was designed to show that quantum mechanics was, as a description of nature, incomplete. In the EPR scenario, non-local influences can affect the measurement outcomes performed on spatially separated particles.

Given how odd that seemed, some physicists invoked what are known as “hidden variables” to get rid of these non-local correlations and restore local realism. It was in 1964, while working at the CERN particle-physics lab, that Bell showed that no local hidden-variable theory can be compatible with the predictions of quantum mechanics.

This result – Bell’s theorem – is something I was familiar with but I had paid little attention to where it had originally appeared. As I discovered, it was published in a paper called “On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox” in the journal Physics (3 195) in 1964. Also known as Physics Physique Физика, this little-known publication existed only from 1964 to 1968. In fact, Bell’s theorem is the most important result published in it.

The journal was set up by two physicists at Bell Laboratories in the US – Bernd Matthias and future Nobel laureate Philip Anderson. According to A Mind Over Matter – Andrew Zangwill’s 2021 biography of Anderson – they were not too happy with conventional physics journals. “The referees,” Anderson said, “often did a bad job, the editors took too long to make...