Abner Shimony heard Aharonov's 1957-paper priority claim directly in the 1960s and built a new Bell test instead of accepting it

physicsquantum-foundationseprbell-theoremhistory-of-sciencebohm-aharonovshimonypriority

This directly answers whether the "Bohm-Aharonov predates Bell" framing is a 2026 retrospective reading or something already claimed and contested at the time. AIP's 2026 institutional history, drawing on historian Joan Bromberg's early-2000s oral-history interviews with Abner Shimony (held in AIP's own collections), reports that after Shimony encountered Bell's 1964 paper, he "consulted with Aharonov, who was now at Yeshiva University in New York. He recalled Aharonov as saying that his 1957 paper with Bohm had settled the matter" — meaning Yakir Aharonov was already making a version of the priority claim directly to a contemporary physicist in the 1960s, not only in a 2026 oral-history interview.

Shimony was not persuaded, in his own words from the interview transcript: "The more I thought of it, the less convinced I was." The same account states he independently checked the data: "Taking his cues from Bohm and Yakir Aharonov, Shimony started searching the physics literature for evidence that tested Bell's theorem, beginning with the Wu-Shaknov experiment, which he quickly realized did not include the needed measurements." Shimony concluded a wholly new experiment was required — the line of work that led to the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt 1969 inequality and the Freedman-Clauser 1972 test. This rests on one root: Shimony's own testimony, reported secondhand through AIP's retelling of Bromberg's interview rather than this vault's own read of the transcript.