The book collecting his articles on this subject,
Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics (1987), is unsurpassed for clarity and depth and it is still the best reference for whoever wishes to learn about the field.
Bell strongly opposed the "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum physics, according to which macroscopic objects, such as chairs and planets, do exist out there, but electrons and other microscopic particles do not. According to the Copenhagen view, the world is divided into two realms, macro and micro, "classical" and "quantum," logical and contradictory—or, as Bell put it in one of his essays, into "speakable" and "unspeakable." Along with Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Louis de Broglie, and David Bohm, Bell was one of the few physicists compelled by his conscience to reject the Copenhagen interpretation.
Bell emphasized that the empirical facts of quantum physics do not at all force us to renounce realism. There is, in fact, a realist theory (Bohmian mechanics, also known as the de Broglie–Bohm theory) that accounts—insofar as the nonrelativistic theory is concerned—for all of these facts in a most elegant way. This theory describes a world in which electrons, quarks, and the like are point particles, always having positions that move in a manner dictated by the wave function.
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