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by
David Pratt
November 1997
Original article
published in Sunrise, Feb./March 1993
The death of David Bohm on 27 October 1992 is a great loss not only
for the physics community but for all those interested in the
philosophical implications of modern science. David Bohm was one of
the most distinguished theoretical physicists of his generation, and
a fearless challenger of scientific orthodoxy. His interests and
influence extended far beyond physics and embraced biology,
psychology, philosophy, religion, art, and the future of society.
Underlying his innovative approach to many different issues was the
fundamental idea that beyond the visible, tangible world there lies
a deeper, implicate order of undivided wholeness.
David Bohm was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1917. He
became interested in science at an early age; as a young boy he
invented a dripless teapot, and his father, a successful
businessman, urged him to try to make a profit on the idea. But
after learning that the first step was to conduct a door-to-door
survey to test market demand, his interest in business waned and he
decided to become a theoretical physicist instead.
In the 1930s he attended Pennsylvania State College where he became
deeply interested in quantum physics, the physics of the subatomic
realm. After graduating, he attended the University of California,
Berkeley. While there he worked at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory
where, after receiving his doctorate in 1943, he began what was to
become his landmark work on plasmas (a plasma is a gas containing a
high density of electrons and positive ions). Bohm was surprised to
find that once electrons were in a plasma, they stopped behaving
like individuals and started behaving as if they were part of a
larger and interconnected whole. He later remarked that he
frequently had the impression that the sea of electrons was in some
sense alive.
In 1947 Bohm took up the post of assistant professor at Princeton
University, where he extended his research to the study of electrons
in metals. Once again the seemingly haphazard movements of
individual electrons managed to produce highly organized overall
effects. Bohm’s innovative work in this area established his
reputation as a theoretical physicist.
In 1951 Bohm wrote a classic textbook entitled Quantum Theory, in
which he presented a clear account of the orthodox, Copenhagen
interpretation of quantum physics. The Copenhagen interpretation was
formulated mainly by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the 1920s
and is still highly influential today. But even before the book was
published, Bohm began to have doubts about the assumptions
underlying the conventional approach. He had difficulty accepting
that subatomic particles had no objective existence and took on
definite properties only when physicists tried to observe and
measure them. He also had difficulty believing that the quantum
world was characterized by absolute indeterminism and chance, and
that things just happened for no reason whatsoever. He began to
suspect that there might be deeper causes behind the apparently
random and crazy nature of the subatomic world.
Bohm sent copies of his textbook to Bohr and Einstein.
Bohr did not
respond, but Einstein phoned him to say that he wanted to discuss it
with him. In the first of what was to turn into a six-month series
of spirited conversations, Einstein enthusiastically told Bohm that
he had never seen quantum theory presented so clearly, and admitted
that he was just as dissatisfied with the orthodox approach as Bohm
was. They both admired quantum theory’s ability to predict
phenomena, but could not accept that it was complete and that it was
impossible to arrive at any clearer understanding of what was going
on in the quantum realm.
It was while writing Quantum Theory that Bohm came into conflict
with McCarthyism. He was called upon to appear before the
Un-American Activities Committee in order to testify against
colleagues and associates. Ever a man of principle, he refused. The
result was that when his contract at Princeton expired, he was
unable to obtain a job in the USA. He moved first to
Brazil, then to
Israel, and finally to Britain in 1957, where he worked first at
Bristol University and later as Professor of Theoretical Physics at
Birkbeck College, University of London, until his retirement in
1987. Bohm will be remembered above all for two radical scientific
theories:
In 1952, the year after his discussions with
Einstein, Bohm
published two papers sketching what later came to be called the
causal interpretation of quantum theory, and he continued to
elaborate and refine his ideas until the end of his life. The causal
interpretation, says Bohm, ’opens the door for the creative
operation of underlying, and yet subtler, levels of reality’. In
his view, subatomic particles such as electrons are not simple, structureless particles, but highly complex,
dynamic entities. He
rejected the view that their motion is fundamentally uncertain or
ambiguous; they follow a precise path, but one which is determined
not only by conventional physical forces but also by a subtler force
which he calls the quantum potential. The quantum potential
guides
the motion of particles by providing ’active information’ about the
whole environment. Bohm gives the analogy of a ship being guided by
radar signals: the radar carries information from all around and
guides the ship by giving form to the movement produced by the much
greater but unformed power of its engines.
The quantum potential pervades all space and provides direct
connections between quantum systems. In 1959 Bohm and a young
research student Yakir Aharonov discovered an important example of
quantum interconnectedness. They found that in certain circumstances
electrons are able to ’feel’ the presence of a nearby magnetic field
even though they are traveling in regions of space where the field
strength is zero. This phenomenon is now known as the Aharonov-Bohm
(AB) effect, and when the discovery was first announced many
physicists reacted with disbelief. Even today, despite confirmation
of the effect in numerous experiments, papers still occasionally
appear arguing that it does not exist.
In 1982 a remarkable experiment to test quantum
interconnectedness was performed by a research team led by
physicist Alain Aspect in Paris. The original idea was
contained in a thought experiment (also known as the ’EPR paradox’) proposed in 1935 by
Albert Einstein,
Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, but much of the later theoretical
groundwork was laid by David Bohm and one of his enthusiastic
supporters, John Bell of CERN, the physics
research center near Geneva. The results of the experiment are said
to have shown that subatomic particles that are far apart are
able to communicate in ways that cannot be explained by the
transfer of physical signals traveling at or slower than the speed
of light. Many physicists regard these ’nonlocal’ connections as absolutely instantaneous. An
alternative view is that they involve subtler, nonphysical energies
traveling faster than light, but this view has few adherents since
most physicists still believe that nothing can exceed the speed of
light.
The causal interpretation of quantum theory initially met with
indifference or hostility from other physicists, who did not take
kindly to Bohm’s powerful challenge to the common consensus. In
recent years, however, the theory has been gaining increasing
’respectability’. Bohm’s approach is capable of being developed in
different directions. For instance, a number of physicists,
including Jean-Pierre Vigier and several other physicists at the
Institut Henri Poincaré in France, explain the quantum potential in
terms of fluctuations in an underlying ether.
In the 1960s Bohm began to take a closer look at the notion of
order. One day he saw a device on a television program that
immediately fired his imagination. It consisted of two concentric
glass cylinders, the space between them being filled with glycerin,
a highly viscous fluid. If a droplet of ink is placed in the fluid
and the outer cylinder is turned, the droplet is drawn out into a
thread that eventually becomes so thin that it disappears from view;
the ink particles are enfolded into the glycerin. But if the
cylinder is then turned in the opposite direction, the thread-form
reappears and rebecomes a droplet; the droplet is unfolded again.
Bohm realized that when the ink was diffused through the glycerin it
was not in a state of ’disorder’ but possessed a hidden, or
nonmanifest, order.
In Bohm’s view, all the separate objects, entities,
structures, and events in the visible or explicate world around us
are relatively autonomous, stable, and temporary ’subtotalities’ derived from a
deeper, implicate order of unbroken wholeness. Bohm gives the
analogy of a flowing stream:
On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices,
ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independent
existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing
movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow.
Such transitory subsistence as may be possessed by these abstracted
forms implies only a relative independence or autonomy of behavior,
rather than absolutely independent existence as ultimate substances.
We must learn to view everything as part of
’Undivided Wholeness in
Flowing Movement’
Another metaphor Bohm uses to illustrate the implicate order is that
of the hologram. To make a hologram a laser light is split into two
beams, one of which is reflected off an object onto a photographic
plate where it interferes with the second beam. The complex swirls
of the interference pattern recorded on the photographic plate
appear meaningless and disordered to the naked eye. But like the ink
drop dispersed in the glycerin, the pattern possesses a hidden or
enfolded order, for when illuminated with laser light it produces a
three-dimensional image of the original object, which can be viewed
from any angle. A remarkable feature of a hologram is that if a
holographic film is cut into pieces, each piece produces an image of
the whole object, though the smaller the piece the hazier the image.
Clearly the form and structure of the entire object are
encoded
within each region of the photographic record.
Bohm suggests that the whole universe can be thought of as a kind of
giant, flowing hologram, or holomovement, in which a total order is
contained, in some implicit sense, in each region of space and time.
The explicate order is a projection from higher dimensional levels
of reality, and the apparent stability and solidity of the objects
and entities composing it are generated and sustained by a ceaseless
process of enfoldment and unfoldment, for subatomic particles are
constantly dissolving into the implicate order and then
recrystallizing.
The quantum potential postulated in the causal interpretation
corresponds to the implicate order. But Bohm suggests that the
quantum potential is itself organized and guided by a superquantum
potential, representing a second implicate order, or superimplicate
order. Indeed he proposes that there may be an infinite series, and
perhaps hierarchies, of implicate (or ’generative’) orders, some of
which form relatively closed loops and some of which do not. Higher
implicate orders organize the lower ones, which in turn influence
the higher.
Bohm believed that life and consciousness are enfolded deep in the
generative order and are therefore present in varying degrees of
unfoldment in all matter, including supposedly ’inanimate’
matter such as electrons or plasmas. He
suggests that there is a ’protointelligence’
in matter, so that new evolutionary developments do not emerge in a
random fashion but creatively as relatively integrated wholes from
implicate levels of reality. The mystical connotations of
Bohm’s
ideas are underlined by his remark that the implicate domain ’could
equally well be called idealism, spirit, consciousness. The
separation of the two -- matter and spirit -- is an abstraction.
The
ground is always one.’
As with all truly great thinkers, David Bohm’s philosophical ideas
found expression in his character and way of life. His students and
colleagues describe him as totally unselfish and non-competitive,
always ready to share his latest thoughts with others, always open
to fresh ideas, and single-mindedly devoted to a calm but passionate
search into the nature of reality. In the words of one of his former
students, ’He can only be characterized as a secular saint’.
Bohm believed that the general tendency for individuals, nations,
races, social groups, etc., to see one another as fundamentally
different and separate was a major source of conflict in the world.
It was his hope that one day people would come to recognize the
essential interrelatedness of all things and would join together to
build a more holistic and harmonious world. What better tribute to
David Bohm’s life and work than to take this message to heart and
make the ideal of universal brotherhood the keynote of our lives.
References:
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David Bohm & F. David Peat,
Science, Order & Creativity, Bantam
Books, New York, 1987, p. 88. See also ’Consciousness, causality,
and quantum physics’.
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David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge & Kegan
Paul, London, Boston, 1980, p. 48.
Ibid., p. 11.
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R. Weber, Dialogues with Scientists and Sages: The Search for Unity, Arkana, p. 101.
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J. Hiley & F. David Peat (eds.),
Quantum Implications: Essays in Honour of David Bohm, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987, p. 48.
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