On Tuesday 27 October 1992 David Bohm died of a heart attack while returning home from College, where we had been discussing the final details of our book The Undivided Universe (90).* We had been colleagues since joining Birkbeck College over 30 years ago and we spent many hours discussing a wide range of topics and writing many papers together. I will never forget those exciting and stimulating meetings. He would never spend any time on ordinary conversation, but he would immediately pick up on what we had been discussing the previous day and there would be no let–up in the discussion that followed until it was time to lecture or to go home. It was exhausting but it was exhilarating. What follows is an account of a radical independent thinker who made important contributions to physics yet had the courage to challenge the orthodoxy long before people realized there was a real problem. I hope that my personal involvment in his later work does not cloud the objectivity of this Memoir too much.
On Tuesday 27 October 1992 David Bohm died of a heart attack while returning home from College, where we had been discussing the final details of our book The Undivided Universe (90).* We had been colleagues since joining Birkbeck College over 30 years ago and we spent many hours discussing a wide range of topics and writing many papers together. I will never forget those exciting and stimulating meetings. He would never spend any time on ordinary conversation, but he would immediately pick up on what we had been discussing the previous day and there would be no let–up in the discussion that followed until it was time to lecture or to go home. It was exhausting but it was exhilarating. What follows is an account of a radical independent thinker who made important contributions to physics yet had the courage to challenge the orthodoxy long before people realized there was a real problem. I hope that my personal involvment in his later work does not cloud the objectivity of this Memoir too much.
Based on his famous final year undergraduate lectures on theoretical physics at Birkbeck College, Bohm presents the theory of relativity as a unified whole, making clear the reasons which led to its adoption and explaining its basic meaning. With clarity and grace, he also reveals the limited truth of some of the "common sense" assumptions which make it difficult for us to appreciate its full implications.With a new foreword by Basil Hiley, a close colleague of David Bohm's, The Special Theory of Relativity is an indispensable addition to the work of one of greatest physicists and thinkers of the twentieth century.
David Bohm is one of the foremost scientific thinkers of today and one of the most distinguished scientists of his generation. His challenge to the conventional understanding of quantum theory has led scientists to reexamine what it is they are going and his ideas have been an inspiration across a wide range of disciplines. Quantum Implications is a collection of original contributions by many of the world' s leading scholars and is dedicated to David Bohm, his work and the issues raised by his ideas. The contributors range across physics, philosophy, biology, art, psychology, and include some of the most distinguished scientists of the day. There is an excellent introduction by the editors, putting Bohm's work in context and setting right some of the misconceptions that have persisted about the work of David Bohm
OUR EDITOR caught up with physicist David Bohm for a few days at Bailey Farm, a “think-tank” for lawyers in New York state. Autumn was crisp in the air with golden leaves and agreeable conversation as they walked together through the local woods. Bohm was in the middle of writing several books simultaneously with a number of his colleagues on the brood implications of his view of quantum physics for current ideas in psychology, sociology, and philosophy. In this wide-ranging interview, Bohm talks for the first time about his early scientific development, his relations with Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein, and his idealistic struggles to actualize heightened states of being within a creative community. He also talks about imagery, stress, and the difficult evolutionary struggle in which we are currently engaged to free our minds from the negative conditioning of the past and the conceptual blind alleys of the present. David Bohm takes us on a journey into the post-modern world, a cultural step beyond relativity and quantum theory.
Vor seiner Emeritierung war David Bohm Professor für theoretische Physik am Birkbeck College in London. Er gilt seit über dreißig Jahren weltweit als führende Autorität auf dem Gebiet der Quantenmechanik. Auf ihn geht die Neuformulierung des EPR-Experiments in seiner modernen Form zurück. Während seiner wissenschaftlichen Laufbahn war Bohm der führende Vertreter der Interpretationen der verborgenen Variablen und verfaßte zahlreiche wissenschaftliche Arbeiten mit dem Ziel einer gesicherten Theorie. Mit seinem Mitarbeiter Basil Hiley hat er vor kurzem eine nicht-lokale Theorie der Quantenmechanik entworfen, die von dem Gedanken des «Quantenpotentials» ausgeht. Einen großen Ruf genießen auch Bohms philosophische Überlegungen zur modernen Physik.
Abstract Niels Bohr was born on 7 October 1885, the son of Professor Christian Bohr, the physiologist, and Ellen, daughter of D. B. Alder, a banker. He had one sister, Jenny, and a brother, Harald, who became Professor of Mathematics in the University of Copenhagen. They grew up in a home of culture. From his father, Niels became acquainted with the problems of biology and in later years became interested again in biological problems through his interests in complementarity. He was educated in Copenhagen, first at the Gammelholm School and then at the University. Whilst there, he became interested in philosophical problems through attending the lectures of Hoffding. According to Rosenfeld (Nordita Publication No. 57) ‘he was fascinated by some of the great religious figures of the past, especially the Jewish prophets and the Buddha; he earnestly endeavoured to penetrate the human side of their teachings and arrived at interpretations of striking originality. Into these sacred texts, coming from the innermost recesses of the human soul, he read an effort to account in a peculiar language for that deepest complementarity between rational knowledge and living experience of the cosmos which in his eyes characterized man’s ambiguous position and rules his whole activity. No wonder that such deep seated views were to play a leading part in his thought in later years and even pervade every shade of his sensitive reaction to the various impressions of everyday life’. During his adolescent years Niels Bohr together with his brother, Harald, were good footballers and his passion for sport was transferred in time to skiing and sailing. He was a lover of the arts and when Eric Gill’s carving of Rutherford installed in the Mond Laboratory at Cambridge was being criticized he was delighted to be presented by Dirac and Kapitza with a copy for his Institute at Copenhagen.
A few days later, while finishing his dinner, Mr Tompkins remembered that it was the night of the professor's lecture on the structure of the atom, which he had promised to attend. But he was so fed up with his father-in-law's interminable expositions that he decided to forget the lecture and spend a comfortable evening at home. However, just as he was getting settled with his book, Maud cut off this avenue of escape by looking at the clock and remarking, gently but firmly, that it was almost time for him to leave. So, half an hour later, he found himself on a hard wooden bench in the university auditorium together with a crowd of eager young students. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ began the professor, looking at them gravely over his spectacles, ‘In my last lecture I promised to give you more details concerning the internal structure of the atom, and to explain how the peculiar features of this structure account for its physical and chemical properties. You know, of course, that atoms are no longer considered as elementary indivisible constituent parts of matter, and that this role has passed now to much smaller particles such as electrons, protons, etc.’