“The beables of the theory are those elements which might correspond to elements of reality, to things which exist. Their existence does not depend on ‘observation’. Indeed observation and observers must be made out of beables.”
Or as he explains elsewhere,
“The concept of ‘observable’ ... is a rather woolly concept. It is not easy to identify precisely which physical processes are to be given the status of ‘observations’ and which are to be relegated to the limbo between one observation and another. So it could be hoped that some increase in precision might be possible by concentration on the beables ... because they are there.”
Bell’s reservations here (about the concept “observable” appearing in the fundamental formulation of allegedly fundamental theories) are closely related to the so-called “measurement problem” of orthodox quantum mechanics, which Bell encapsulated by remarking that the orthodox theory is “unprofessionally vague and ambiguous” in so far as its fundamental dynamics is expressed in terms of “words which, however legitimate and necessary in application, have no place in a
formulation with any pretension to physical precision” – such words as
“system, apparatus, environment, microscopic, macroscopic, reversible, irreversible, observable, information, measurement.” As Bell elaborates,
“The concepts ‘system’, ‘apparatus’, ‘environment’, immediately imply an artificial division of the world, and an intention to neglect, or take only schematic account of, the interaction across the split. The notions of ‘microscopic’ and ‘macroscopic’ defy precise definition. So also do the notions of ‘reversible’ and ‘irreversible’. Einstein said that it is theory which decides what is ‘observable’. I think he was right – ‘observable’ is a complicated and theory-laden business. Then the notion should not appear in the formulation of fundamental theory.”
As Bell points out, even Bohr (a convenient personification of skepticism regarding the physical reality of unobservable microscopic phenomena) recognizes certain things (for example, the directly perceivable states of a classical measuring apparatus) as unambiguously real, i.e., as beables.
[...]
The unprofessional vagueness and ambiguity of orthodox quantum theory, then, is related to the fact that its formulation presupposes these (classical, macroscopic) beables, but fails to provide clear mathematical laws to describe them. As Bell explains,
“The kinematics of the world, in [the] orthodox picture, is given by a wavefunction ... for the quantum part, and classical variables – variables which have values – for the classical part... [with the classical variables being] somehow macroscopic. This is not spelled out very explicitly. The dynamics is not very precisely formulated either. It includes a Schrödinger equation for the quantum part, and some sort of classical mechanics for the classical part, and ‘collapse’ recipes for their interaction.”
There are thus two related problems. First, the posited ontology is rather different on the two sides of (what Bell calls) “the shifty split” – that is, the division between “the quantum part” and “the classical part.” But then, as a whole, the posited ontology remains unavoidably vague so long as the split remains shifty – i.e., so long as the dividing line between the macroscopic and microscopic remains undefined. And second, the interaction across the split is problematic. Not only is the account of this dynamics (the “collapse” process) inherently bound up in concepts from Bell’s list of dubious terms, but the very existence of a special dynamics for the interaction seems to imply inconsistencies with the dynamics already posited for the two realms separately. As Bell summarizes,
“I think there are professional problems [with quantum mechanics]. That is to say, I’m a professional theoretical physicist and I would like to make a clean theory. And when I look at quantum mechanics I see that it’s a dirty theory. The formulations of quantum mechanics that you find in the books involve dividing the world into an observer and an observed, and you are not told where that division comes... So you have a theory which is fundamentally ambiguous...”
The point of all this is to clarify the sort of theory Bell had in mind as satisfying the relevant standards of professionalism in physics.
. 
but wait... conservation of the CPT symmetry requires time reversal to rename particles as antiparticles and vice versa... tachyonic antitelephone anyone?? 
)
