David Bohm: A Life Dedicated to Understanding the Quantum World

Olival Freire

Richard Halpern

M. Teodorani

Basil J. Hiley, F. David Peat

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

Olival Freire

William Seager

David Bohm is famous for inventing a ‘hidden variables’ interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which particles possess definite positions and momenta, but nonetheless preserve distinctively quantum phenomena perfectly in line with orthodox quantum mechanics. Bohm achieved this by interpreting the quantum wave function as a kind of universal ‘guidance wave’. But his particulate model does not represent the lesson which Bohm thought quantum mechanics was trying to teach us. Bohm had a much more radical metaphysical vision in which the world was, in some difficult to understand sense, an undivided whole. In this paper, I explore a compelling confluence of thought between William James and David Bohm. Arriving from very different starting points and proceeding in very different ways, they share a vision of a unitary world, undivided and ‘beyond’ all the categories of thought and perception. This vision is intrinsically interesting, not least because of the light it shines on the problem of consciousness. It both addresses and presents an entirely novel solution to the famous ‘hard problem of consciousness’.