Interview with David Bohm 1987.pdf

Interview with David Bohm - F. David Peat

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David Bohm 1917-1992

This interview with David Bohm, conducted by F. David Peat and

John Briggs, was originally published in Omni, January 1987

A text only version of this interview is available to download.

In 1950 David Bohm wrote what many physicists

consider to be a model textbook on quantum

mechanics. Ironically, he has never accepted that

theory of physics. In the history of science he is

a maverick, a member of that small group of

physicists-including Albert Einstein, Eugene

Wigner, Erwin Schrödinger, Alfred Lande, Paul

Dirac, and John Wheeler--who have expressed

grave doubts that a theory founded on

indeterminism and chance could give us a true

view of the universe around us.

David Bohm

Today's generation of physicists, impressed by the stunning

successes of quantum physics--from nuclear weapons to lasers-are of

a different mind. They are busy applying quantum mechanics to

areas its original creators never imagined. Stephen Hawking, for

example, used it to describe the creation of elementary particles from

black holes and to argue that the universe exploded into being in a

quantum-mechanical event.

Bucking this tide of modern physics for more than 30 years, Bohm

has been more than a gadfly. His objections to the foundations of

quantum mechanics have gradually coalesced into an extension of

the theory so sweeping that it amounts to a new view of reality.

Believing that the nature of things is not reducible to fragments or

particles, he argues for a holistic view of the universe. He demands

that we learn to regard matter and life as a whole, coherent domain,

which he calls the implicate order.

Most other physicists discard Bohm's logic without bothering to

scrutinize it. Part of the difficulty is that his implicate order is rife

with paradox. Another problem is the sheer range of his ideas, which

encompass such hitherto nonphysical subjects as consciousness,

society, truth, language, and the process of scientific theory making

itself.

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Interview with David Bohm - F. David Peat

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The son of a furniture dealer, Bohm was born in Wilkes-Barre,

Pennsylvania, in 1917. He studied physics at the University of

California with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Unwilling to testify against his

former teacher and other friends during the McCarthy hearings,

Bohm left the United States and took a post at the University of São

Paulo, Brazil. From there he moved to Israel, then England, where he

eventually became professor of physics at Birkbeck College in

London.

Bohm is perhaps best known for his early work on the interactions of

electrons in metals. He showed that their individual, haphazard

movement concealed a highly organized and cooperative behavior

called plasma oscillation. This intimation of an order underlying

apparent chaos was pivotal in Bohm's development.

In 1959 Bohm, working with Yakir Ahronov, showed that a magnetic

field might alter the behavior of electrons without touching them: If

two electron beams were passed on either side of a space containing

a magnetic field, the field would retard the waves of one beam even

though it did not penetrate the space and actually touch the

electrons. This 'AB effect" was verified a year later.

During the Fifties and Sixties Bohm expanded his belief in the

existence of hidden variables that control seemingly random

quantum events, and from that point on, his ideas diverged more

and more from the mainstream of modern physics. His books

Causality and Chance in Modern Physics and Wholeness and the

Implicate Order, published in 1957 and 1980, respectively, spell out

his new theory in considerable detail. In the Sixties Bohm met the

Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, and their continuing

dialogues, published as a book, The Ending of Time, helped the

physicist clarify his ideas about wholeness and order.

Recently retired from Birkbeck College, Bohm is now trying to

develop a mathematical version of his implicate-order hypothesis-the

kind of precise, testable theory that other physicists will take

seriously. It is not an easy task, for Bohm's universe is a strange,

mystical place in which past, present, and future coexist. The objects

in his universe, even the subatomic particles, are secondary; it is a

process of movement, continuous unfolding and enfolding from a

seamless whole that is fundamental. To test the theory of general

relativity, Einstein forecast that the sun's gravity would bend light

waves from distant stars; he was correct. So far Bohm has been

unable to find an experimental aspect that could support his ideas in

the same way.

Although recently recovered from serious heart surgery, Bohm

continues to make frequent trips throughout Europe and to the

United States, where he lectures, talks to colleagues, and encourages

students. His ideas have been enthusiastically received by

philosophers, neuroscientists, theologians, poets, and artists.

Bohm was interviewed by John Briggs and F. David Peat, authors of

Looking Glass Universe , over a two-day period near Amherst College

in Massachusetts, where Bohm was involved in a series of meetings

with the Dalai Lama. Additional comments are taken from a previous

interview in England by writer Llee Heflin.

Omni: Can you recall when you first experienced the sense of the

wholeness that you now express as the implicate order? Bohm: When

I was a boy a certain prayer we said every day in Hebrew contained

the words to love God with all your heart all your soul, and all your

mind. My understanding of these words, that is, this notion of

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Interview with David Bohm - F. David Peat

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wholeness--not necessarily directed toward God but as a way of

living--had a tremendous impact on me. I also felt a sense of nature

being whole very early. I felt internally related to trees, mountains,

and stars in a way I wasn't to all the chaos of the cities.

When I first studied quantum mechanics I felt again that sense of

internal relationship--that it was describing something that I was

experiencing directly rather than just thinking about.

The notion of spin particularly fascinated me: the idea that when

something is spinning in a certain direction, it could also spin in the

other direction but that somehow the two directions together would

be a spin in a third direction. I felt that somehow that described

experience with the processes of the mind. In thinking about spin I

felt I was in a direct relationship to nature. In quantum mechanics I

came closer to my intuitive sense of nature.

Omni: Yet you've said that quantum mechanics doesn't provide a

clear picture of nature. What do you mean?

Bohm: The main problem is that quantum mechanics gives only the

probability of an experimental result. Neither the decay of an atomic

nucleus nor the fact that it decays at one moment and not another

can be properly pictured within the theory. It can only enable you to

predict statistically the results of various experiments.

Physics has changed from its earlier form, when it tried to explain

things and give some physical picture. Now the essence is regarded

as mathematical. It's felt the truth is in the formulas. Now they may

find an algorithm by which they hope to explain a wider range of

experimental results, but it will still have inconsistencies. They hope

that they can eventually explain all the results that could be gotten,

but that is only a hope.

Omni: How did the founders of quantum mechanics initially receive

your book Quantum Theory?

Bohm: In the Fifties, when I sent it around to various

physicists-including [Niels] Bohr, Einstein, and [Wolfgangl Pauli--Bohr

didn't answer, but Pauli liked it. Einstein sent me a message that he'd

like to talk with me. When we met he said the book had done about

as well as you could do with quantum mechanics. But he was still not

convinced it was a satisfactory theory.

His objection was not merely that it was statistical. He felt it was a

kind of abstraction; quantum mechanics got correct results but left

out much that would have made it intelligible. I came up with the

causal interpretation [that the electron is a particle, but it also has a

field around it. The particle is never separated from that field, and

the field affects the movement of the particle in certain ways].

Einstein didn't like it, though, because the interpretation had this

notion of action at a distance: Things that are far away from each

other profoundly affect each other. He believed only in local action.

I didn't come back to this implicate order until the Sixties, when I got

interested in notions of order. I realized then the problem is that

coordinates are still the basic order in physics, whereas everything

else has changed.

Omni: Your key concept is something you call enfoldment. Could you

explain it?

Bohm: Everybody has seen an image of enfoldment: You fold up a

sheet of paper, turn it into a small packet, make cuts in it, and then

unfold it into a pattern. The parts that were close in the cuts unfold

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Interview with David Bohm - F. David Peat

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to be far away. This is like what happens in a hologram. Enfoldment

is really very common in our experience. All the light in this room

comes in so that the entire room is in effect folded into each part. If

your eye looks, the light will be then unfolded by your eye and brain.

As you look through a telescope or a camera, the whole universe of

space and time is enfolded into each part, and that is unfolded to the

eye. With an old-fashioned television set that's not adjusted properly,

the image enfolds into the screen and then can be unfolded by

adjustment.

Omni: You spoke of coordinates and order a moment ago. How do

they tie in with enfoldment? Do you mean coordinates like those on a

grid?

Bohm: Yes, but not necessarily straight lines. They are a way of

mapping space and time. Since space-time may be curved, the lines

may be curved as well. It became clear that each general notion of

the world contains within it a specific idea of order. The ancient

Greeks had the idea of an increasing perfection from the earth to the

heavens. Modern physics contains the idea of successive positions of

bodies of matter and the constraints of forces that act on these

bodies. The order of perfection investigated by the ancient Greeks is

now considered irrelevant.

The most radical change in the notion of order since Isaac Newton

came with quantum mechanics. The quantum-mechanical idea of

order contradicts coordinate order because Heisenberg's uncertainty

principle made a detailed ordering of space and time impossible.

When you apply quantum theory to general relativity, at very short

distances like ten to the minus thirty-three centimeters, the notion of

the order of space and time breaks down.

Omni: Can you replace that with some other sense of order?

Bohm: First you have to ask what we mean by order. Everybody has

some tacit notion of it, but order itself is impossible to define. Yet it

can be illustrated. In a photograph any part of an object is imaged

into a point. This point-to-point correspondence emphasizes the

notion of point as fundamental in sense of order. Cameras now

photograph things too big or too small, too fast or too slow to be

seen by the naked eye. This has reinforced our belief that everything

can ultimately be seen that way.

Omni: Aren't the contradictions you have been talking about

embedded in the very name quantum mechanics?

Bohm: Yes. Physics is more like quantum organism than quantum

mechanics. I think physicists have a tremendous reluctance to admit

this. There is a long history of belief in quantum mechanics, and

people have faith in it. And they don't like having this faith

challenged.

Omni: So our image is the lens, the apparatus suggesting the point.

The point in turn suggests electrons and particles.

Bohm: And the track of particles on the photograph. Now what

instrument would illustrate wholeness? Perhaps the holograph.

Waves from the whole object come into each part of the hologram.

This makes the hologram a kind of knowledge of the whole object. If

you examine it with a very narrow beam of laser light, it's as if you

were looking through a window the size of that laser beam. If you

expand the beam, it's as though you are looking through a broader

window that sees the object more precisely and from more angles.

But you are always getting information about the whole object, no

matter how much or little of it you take.

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But let's put aside the hologram because that's only a static record.

Returning to the actual situation, we have a constant dynamic

pattern of waves coming off an object and interfering with the

original wave. Within that pattern of movement, many objects are

enfolded in each region of space and time.

Classical physics says that reality is actually little particles that

separate the world into its independent elements. Now I'm proposing

the reverse, that the fundamental reality is the enfoldment and

unfoldment, and these particles are abstractions from that. We could

picture the electron not as a particle that exists continuously but as

something coming in and going out and then coming in again. If

these various condensations are close together, they approximate a

track. The electron itself can never be separated from the whole of

space, which is its ground.

About the time I was looking into these questions, a BBC science

program showed a device that illustrates these things very well. It

consists of two concentric glass cylinders. Between them is a viscous

fluid, such as glycerin. If a drop of insoluble ink is placed in the

glycerin and the outer cylinder is turned slowly, the drop of dye will

be drawn out into a thread. Eventually the thread gets so diffused it

cannot be seen. At that moment there seems to be no order present

at all. Yet if you slowly turn the cylinder backward, the glycerin draws

back into its original form, and suddenly the ink drop is visible again.

The ink had been enfolded into the glycerin, and it was unfolded

again by the reverse turning.

Omni: Suppose you put a drop of dye in the cylinder and turn it a

few times, then put another drop in the same place and turn it. When

you turn the cylinder back, wouldn't you get a kind of oscillation?

Bohm: Yes, you would get a movement in and out. We could put in

one drop of dye and turn it and then put in another drop of dye at a

slightly different place, and so on. The first and second droplets are

folded a different number of times. If we keep this up and then turn

the cylinder backward, the drops continually appear and disappear.

So it would look as if a particle were crossing the space, but in fact

it's always the whole system that's involved.

We can discuss the movement of all matter in terms of this folding

and unfolding, which I call the holomovement.

Omni: What do you think is the order of the holomovement?

Bohm: It may lie outside of time as we ordinarily know it. If the

universe began with the Big Bang and there are black holes, then we

must eventually reach places where the notion of time and space

breaks down. Anything could happen. As various cosmologists have

put it, if a black hole came out with a sign flashing COCA COLA, it

shouldn't be surprising. Within the singularity none of the laws as we

know them apply. There are no particles; they are all disintegrated.

There is no space and no time. Whatever is, is beyond any concept

we have at present. The present physics implies that the total

conceptual basis of physics must be regarded as completely

inadequate. The grand unification [of the four forces of the universe]

could be nothing but an abstraction in the face of some further

unknown.

I propose something like this: Imagine an infinite sea of energy filling

empty space, with waves moving around in there, occasionally

coming together and producing an intense pulse. Let's say one

particular pulse comes together and expands, creating our universe

of space-time and matter. But there could well be other such pulses.

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