David Bohm
David Bohm was born on December 20, 1917, in Wilkes-Barre, a city in the United States. He grew up as an American citizen and later held citizenship in Brazil and the United Kingdom as well. His early schooling was at G. A. R. Memorial Junior Senior High School, and he went on to study at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, before also spending time at the University of Bristol.
Bohm worked as a physicist, a nuclear physicist, and a philosopher, and he taught at university level throughout much of his professional life. He worked primarily in English, and his career spanned both the technical side of physics and broader philosophical questions about the nature of reality. His range of intellectual concerns crossed disciplinary lines in ways that shaped his output as a researcher and teacher.
Among his contributions to physics, Bohm developed a causal and deterministic interpretation of quantum theory, a framework that became known as De Broglie–Bohm theory. His standing in the field was recognized through his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society and through the award of the Elliott Cresson Medal, honors that acknowledged his work across physics and philosophy.
Bohm died on October 27, 1992, in London. At the time of his death he held citizenship in the United Kingdom, and London had become the city where his life ended. The Elliott Cresson Medal and his fellowship in the Royal Society remain the formal markers of recognition his peers extended to him during his lifetime.
Quotes by David Bohm
David Bohm's insights on:
If one considers this question carefully, one can see that in a certain sense the East was right to see the immeasurable as the primary reality. For, as has already been indicated, measure is an insight created by man. A reality that is beyond man and prior to him cannot depend on such insight.
The most essential aspects of this philosophy seem to the author, however, to be its assumption that the great diversity of things that appear in all of our experience, every day as well as scientific, can all be reduced completely and perfectly to nothing more than consequences of the operation of an absolute and final set of purely quantitative laws determining the behaviour of a few kinds of basic entities or variables.
I regard the essence of the notion of process as given by the statement: Not only is everything changing, but all is flux. That is to say, what is the process of becoming itself, while all objects, events, entities, conditions, structures, etc., are forms that can be abstracted from this process.
What is called for is not an integration of thought, or a kind of imposed unity, for any such imposed point of view would itself be merely another fragment. Rather, all our different ways of thinking are to be considered as different ways of looking at the one reality, each with some domain in which it is clear and adequate.
Being guided by a fragmentary self-world view, man then acts in such a way as to try to break himself and the world up, so that all seems to correspond to his way of thinking. Man thus obtains an apparent proof of the correctness of his fragmentary self-world view though, of course, he overlooks the fact that it is he himself, acting according to his mode of thought, who has brought about the fragmentation that now seems to have an autonomous existence, independent of his will and of his desire.
On the contrary, when one works in terms of the implicate order, one begins with the undivided wholeness of the universe, and the task of science is to derive the parts through abstraction from the whole, explaining them as approximately separable, stable and recurrent, but externally related elements making up relatively autonomous sub-totalities, which are to be described in terms of an explicate order.
There is a difficulty with only one person changing. People call that person a great saint or a great mystic or a great leader, and they say, ‘Well, he’s different from me – I could never do it.’ What’s wrong with most people is that they have this block – they feel they could never make a difference, and therefore, they never face the possibility, because it is too disturbing, too frightening.
It is especially important to consider this question today, for fragmentation is now very widespread, not only throughout society, but also in each individual; and this is leading to a kind of general confusion of the mind, which creates an endless series of problems and interferes with our clarity of perception so seriously as to prevent us from being able to solve most of them.
Pribram has given evidence backing up his suggestion that memories are generally recorded all over the brain in such a way that information concerning a given object or quality is not stored in a particular cell or localized part of the brain but rather that all the information is enfolded over the whole.
One must then go on to a consideration of time as a projection of multidimensional reality into a sequence of moments.