Abner Eliezer Shimony (March 10, 1928 – August 8, 2015) was an American physicist and philosopher. He specialized in quantum theory and philosophy of science. As a physicist he concentrated on the interaction between relativity theory and quantum mechanics. He has authored many works and research on complementarity in quantum entanglement as well as multiparticle quantum interferometry, both relating to quantum coherence. He has authored research articles and books on the foundations of quantum mechanics. He received the 1966 Lakatos Prize for his work in Philosophy of Science.
Shimony was born in Columbus, Ohio. He obtained his BA in Mathematics and Philosophy from Yale University in 1948, and an MA in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1950. He obtained his Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1953 under the supervision of Rudolf Carnap, and served in the U. S. Army Signal Corps from 1953 to 1955. Shimony acquired his second doctorate in physics from Princeton University in 1962, under the supervision of Eugene Wigner.
After receiving his second Ph.D., Shimony interacted with both the philosophical academic world and the physics academic world. His most famous professional correspondence is with Rudolf Carnap. He taught philosophy of science at MIT from 1959 until 1968 in the school’s Department of Humanities. In 1968 he transferred to Boston University, beginning a 26-year appointment in both the physics and philosophy departments, and was Professor Emeritus there until his death in 2015. Shimony is best known for his work in developing the CHSH inequality, an empirically testable form of the Bell inequality, also known as Bell's theorem. Since 1992, he proposed a geometric measure of quantum entanglement and, along with Gregg Jaeger and Michael Horne, discovered two novel complementarity relations involving interferometric visibility in multiparticle quantum interferometry.