John Stewart Bell is undoubtedly one of the icons of contemporary physics. His name has become inseparable from the notion of quantum non-locality, however, Bell himself always stressed that it was Einstein--together with Podolsky and Rosen--who first recognized the non-local implications of quantum mechanics. Neither did Bell like the operational overtone wielded by quantum information theory on foundations of quantum mechanics. In his last paper (1991) he calls for a deeper, less anthropocentric understanding of quantum non-locality. This is of course much in line with what Einstein would have liked. So Bell was actually far more Einsteinian in his outlook than some of us give him credit for.
What impresses me more about Bell, however, is what he stumbled upon unintentionally. (As many of you know, in my view--which I have discussed, for instance, here--his theorem is a non-starter.) What impresses me is that Bell discovered that quantum correlations are far more disciplined than classical correlations (although he himself did not put his discovery in these terms), in a mathematically very precise sense. This raises a very important physical question:
*What is it that makes quantum correlations so much more disciplined?*
As von Neumann taught us long time ago, no matter which model of physics we are concerned with--the quantum mechanical model, the hidden variable model, or any other--for theoretical purposes all we need to understand are the expectation values (or correlations) of the observables measured in various states of the physical system. Thus, if we understand the origins of quantum correlations, then we have effectively understood quantum mechanics.
A summary of my answer to this question can be found elsewhere on this website (for example on this page ), and a more detailed description of it can be found in my recent papers. Some criticism of my work has been recently put forward by Moldoveanu and I would like to report my response to his criticism, which I have recently posted on the physics archives: arxiv.org/abs/1110.5876.
The latest discussion on the Origins of Quantum Correlations can be found on my blog.
Happy reading!