Abner Shimony was born the same year as John Bell but outlived him by 25 years.

Shimony earned a PH.D. in philosophy from Yale in 1953 supervised by Rudolf Carnap and nine years later a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton, studying under Eugene Wigner.

Shimony taught first at MIT, then at Boston University for many years with a dual appointment at Yale.

A major research interest was exploring the possible conflict between quantum physics and relativity, something that had worried Albert Einstein all his life.

In his lifetime, Shimony did more to promote John Bell's idea of an "inequality theorem," one that might disprove (or prove) quantum mechanics, than possibly any other person.

Just five years after Bell's work, Shimony in 1969 developed an empirically testable form of the Bell inequality, known as the CHSH inequality after the four contributors, John Clauser, Michael Horne, Shimony, and Richard Holt.

Clauser and colleague Richard Freedman did the first experimental test of Bell's inequality in 1971, with results that weakly validated standard quantum mechanics. This was followed by many hundreds of similar tests over the following decades, down to the present day.

Shimony authored the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Bell's Theorem. In an early version(2009), he argued that the perfect correlations of opposite spin states in the entangled pairs is a consequence of the conservation of angular momentum.

[By] conservation of angular momentum the photon pair emitted in the cascade has total angular momentum 0, and if the photons are collected in cones of small aperture along the z-direction the total orbital angular momentum is small, with the consequence that the total spin (or polarization) angular momentum is close to 0 and therefore the polarizations of the two photons are tightly correlated.

"Bell's Theorem," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2009 (retrieved January 23, 2022)

Shimony said that Bell likely assumed that quantum mechanics would violate his "ad hoc" inequality, because quantum mechanics had been so well established.

When Bell published his pioneering paper in 1964 he did not urge an experimental resolution of the conflict between Quantum Mechanics and Local Realistic Theories, probably because the former had been confirmed often and precisely in many branches of physics.

ibid>.

Between 1973 and 1984, Shimony helped organize and contribute to thirty-six issues of a newsletter called Epistemological Letters: Hidden Variables and Quantum Uncertainty.

These privately published newsletters were circulated to about 180 of the most prominent physicists in the world. It contained contributions on the foundations of physics inspired by the work of John Bell, which in turn had been inspired by David Bohm's revival of Louis de Broglie's "pilot wave theory" and their idea of "hidden variables."

In 1984, Jon Jarrett gave a talk at Harvard, and was a guest at the Center for Einstein Studies and the Center for the History and Philosophy of Science at Boston University.

In meetings that included, among others, Shimony and Don Howard, Jarrett introduced a number of new technical terms that have become a major part of philosophical discussions of entanglement. Jarrett proposed what he called a decomposition of Bell' "local

Shimony suggested the term "Passion-at-a-Distance" instead of (Spooky) Action-at-a-distance Although he did not say what he meant by passion, we do acquire distant knowledge "passively," without actively doing anything to the distant particle.

In 2009, one of Shimony's students, Don Howard, elaborated on Shimony's thinking.

In 1984, Abner Shimony invented the expression, "passion at a distance," to characterize the distinctive relationship of two entangled quantum mechanical systems. It is neither the local causality of pushes, pulls, and central forces familiar from classical mechanics and electrodynamics, nor the non-local causality of instantaneous or just superluminal action at a distance that would spell trouble for relativity theory. This mode of connection of entangled systems has them feeling one another's presence and properties enough to ensure the strong correlations revealed in the Bell experiments, correlations that undergird everything from superfluidity and superconductivity to quantum computing and quantum teleportation, but not in a way that permits direct control of one by manipulation of the other. Intended to echo Aristotle's distinguishing of "potentiality" from "actuality" as different senses of "being," Shimony's "passion at a distance" is all about tendency and propensity, not the concreteness whose misplacement in realm of the physical was lamented by Alfred North Whitehead.

Quantum Reality, Relativistic Causality, and Closing the Epistemic Circle 2009, p. 3

But the particles do not (passionately?) "feel one another's presence and properties."
That would require actions.

The "strong correlations revealed in the Bell experiments" are the consequence of a basic conservation principle underlying both classical and quantum mechanics. We describe it as a "common cause" in the shared past light cone of the two particles.

For many years, experimenters and theorists searched for "loopholes" in the experiments that might indicate something wrong with quantum mechanics. Bell had tantalized experimenters with the chance of a Nobel Prize if something was found to be wrong with quantum mechanics. Such a result would "shake the world," he told John Clauser. But every new test has only further confirmed the theory of quantum mechanics.

He also defined two other "conditions," one he called the "factorization condition," the other "Bell's locality condition."

Beginning in 1984, perhaps following Shimony's example, many philosophers of science and some scientists began to develop other new expressions, concepts, and terminology around Bell's theorem, "nonlocality", separability, and hidden variables. Using these new concepts, they formulated logical arguments they hoped would solve some of the paradoxes, problems, and puzzles of quantum physics. Some examples...

A leading contributor of new terminology was Jon P. Jarrett, who was invited to meetings at Boston University and Harvard University to present ideas from his 1983 thesis Bell's Theorem, Quantum Mechanics, and Local Realism

• Contextuality:

  Quantum contextuality is a feature of the phenomenology of quantum mechanics whereby measurements of quantum observables cannot simply be thought of as revealing pre-existing values. Any attempt to do so in a realistic hidden-variable theory leads to values that are dependent upon the choice of the other (compatible) observables which are simultaneously measured (the measurement context). More formally, the measurement result (assumed pre-existing) of a quantum observable is dependent upon which other commuting observables are within the same measurement set. (Wikipedia)