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the subtleties of the arguments between Einstein and Bohr over its meaning and interpretation. It was little wonder they failed to recognise that a 34-year-old Irish physicist, John Stewart Bell, had discovered what Einstein and Bohr could not: a mathematical theorem that could decide between their two opposing philosophical worldviews. For Bohr there was 'no quantum world', only 'an abstract quantum mechanical description'.3 Einstein believed in a reality independent of perception. The debate between Einstein and Bohr was as much about the kind of physics that was acceptable as a meaningful theoretical description of reality as it was about the nature of reality itself.

Einstein was convinced that Bohr and the supporters of the Copenhagen interpretation were playing a 'risky game' with reality.4 John Bell was sympathetic to Einstein's position, but part of the inspiration behind his ground-breaking theorem lay in the work done in the early 1950s by an American physicist forced into exile.

David Bohm was a talented PhD student of Robert Oppenheimer's at the University of California at Berkeley. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in December 1917, Bohm was prevented from joining the top-secret research facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico to work on the development of the atomic bomb in 1943 after Oppenheimer was appointed its director. The authorities cited Bohm's many relatives in Europe, nineteen of whom were to die in Nazi concentration camps, as the reason they considered him to be a security risk. In truth, having been questioned by US army intelligence, and attempting to secure his position as the scientific leader of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer had named Bohm as a possible member of the American Communist party.

Four years later, in 1947, the self-confessed 'shatterer of worlds' took charge of the 'madhouse', as Oppenheimer once called the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.5 Maybe in an attempt to atone for his earlier naming of Bohm, of which his protégé was unaware, Oppenheimer helped him obtain an assistant professorship at Princeton University. Amid the anti-Communist paranoia sweeping the United States after the Second World War, Oppenheimer was soon under suspicion because of his earlier left-wing political views. Having watched him closely for some years, the FBI had compiled a large dossier on the man who knew America's atomic secrets.

In an attempt to smear Oppenheimer, some of his friends and colleagues were investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee and forced to appear before it. In 1948 Bohm, who had joined the American Communist party in 1942 but left after only nine months, invoked the Fifth Amendment that protected him against self-incrimination. Within a year he was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury, and once again pleaded the Fifth. In November 1949 Bohm was arrested, charged with contempt of court and briefly imprisoned before being released on bail. Princeton University, worried about losing wealthy donors, suspended him. Although he was acquitted when his case came to trial in June 1950, the university chose to pay off the remaining year of Bohm's contract, provided he did not set foot on campus. Bohm was blacklisted and unable to find another academic post in the United States, and Einstein seriously considered appointing him as his research assistant. Oppenheimer opposed the idea and was among those who advised his former student to leave the country. In October 1951, Bohm left for Brazil and the University of São Paulo.

He had been in Brazil only a matter of weeks when the American embassy, fearing that his final destination might be the Soviet Union, confiscated Bohm's passport and reissued it as valid only for travel to the United States. Worried that his South American exile would cut him off from the international physics community, Bohm acquired Brazilian nationality to circumvent the travel ban imposed by the Americans. Back in the United States, Oppenheimer faced a hearing. Pressure on him intensified the moment it emerged that Klaus Fuchs,