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Routledge eBooks

General introduction: The development of David Bohm's ideas from the plasma to the implicate order: B. J. Hiley and F. David Peat

Basil J. Hiley, F. David Peat

Published Jun 25, 2012• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

David Bohm was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1917. His father ran a successful furniture business, making his way to the USA from what was then Austria-Hungary. There appears to be no physics whatsoever in the family background. Bohm, himself, became interested in science at an early age, being urged on by a fascination of finding out how things worked. By the age of eight he had already been introduced to science fiction. This fired his imagination and generated in him a deep interest in real science. But it was the nature of the real world that fascinated him most. He recalls the profound effect that a book on astronomy had on him in those formative years. He was struck by the vast order and regularity of the universe. This impressed him so much that he began to devote a great deal of time to science.

DOI
10.4324/9780203392799-4

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David Bohm was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1917. His father ran a successful furniture business, making his way to the USA from what was then Austria-Hungary. There appears to be no physics whatsoever in the family background. Bohm, himself, became interested in science at an early age, being urged on by a fascination of finding out how things worked. By the age of eight he had already been introduced to science fiction. This fired his imagination and generated in him a deep interest in real science. But it was the nature of the real world that fascinated him most. He recalls the profound effect that a book on astronomy had on him in those formative years. He was struck by the vast order and regularity of the universe. This impressed him so much that he began to devote a great deal of time to science.
David Bohm (1917-93) was a highly original and individual physicist. His novel ideas and profound intuition extended not only to the physical world but also to the nature of consciousness and society. Bohm regarded science as having become essentially fragmented in its approach to understanding physical reality and sought a more holistic physics based on order, transformation and flowing movement. His notion of an implicate order provides an unusual and exciting challenge for both teachers and students alike.
David Bohm was a major twentieth-century theoretical physicist. His scientific work concerned plasma and the foundations of quantum mechanics and, connected to his scientific work, Bohm was deeply interested in the philosophy of science and psychological studies. Bohm’s influence on psychology derived more from his philosophical writings than from his scientific works. This paper considers both of Bohm’s works while distinguishing them. This is further necessary because anyone intending to work on Bohm’s legacy needs to develop his un-consensual ideas further. This paper makes a brief and non-technical description of Bohm’s works in physics and his philosophical views, related to the idea of wholeness and the implicate order, which includes his incursions in psychology. It ends with some caveats about the better extension of his reflections.
B J Hiley and F David Peat (eds) 1987 London: Routledge and Kegan Paul vii + 455 pp price £25 ISBN 0 7102 0806 5 This weighty volume is a fitting tribute to a gifted and modest physicist, renowned for many things: for key insights in diverse areas of theoretical physics; for the suggestion of penetrating fundamental experiments; for the authorship of influential textbooks that set new standards of depth and clarity of exposition. The intellectual influence of David Bohm can be measured by the impressive line-up of 30 contributors to this volume, including Nobel laureates Feynman, Prigogine and Wilkins.
David Joseph Bohm was born on December 20, 1917, and obtained the doctorate in physics in 1943 from the University of California, Berkeley, under the guidance of R. Oppenheimer[1]. From 1946 he began teaching at Princeton University. He has published a series of articles on various physics topics, especially on plasma oscillations. He then wrote the book Quantum Theory considered to date a classic in the subject. In 1950 he was indicted and imprisoned for political reasons, and although acquitted in May 1951, Princeton University refused to renew his contract and he was exiled to Brazil. In 1954, David Bohm elaborated the work entitled A proposal for interpretation of quantum theory in terms of quothidden variablesquot(3), which sought a causal and objective description of quantum phenomena. In 1960 he enthusiastically discovered the thinking of the Indian Jiddu Krishnamurti, and from dialogues between them emerged interesting ideas in the area of the confluence of Physics with the mystical tradition.
This chapter focuses on the work of David Bohm carried out together and then pursued and amplified by his collaborator Basil Hiley. Like the case studies in the other chapters, quantum physics played a key role in this approach too, especially the notion of non-local order. Bohm distinguishes between “implicate order” and “explicate order,” with the former constituting the psychophysically neutral realm similar to Pauli and Jung’s Unus Mundus from which both the mental and the physical emerge as explications. In this view, meaning is involved at the deep, implicate level through the notion of “active information”. When the implicate order (an undivided whole) is explicated into a multiplicity, this does naturally imply correlations that constitute the mind-matter connection. We also explore Hiley’s algebraic accounts linking back to Eddington’s ideas, as well as some of Bohm’s views of the relation between perception, language, and reality.
David Bohm was one of the foremost scientific thinkers and philosophers of our time. Although deeply influenced by Einstein, he was also, more unusually for a scientist, inspired by mysticism. Indeed, in the 1970s and 1980s he made contact with both J. Krishnamurti and the Dalai Lama whose teachings helped shape his work. In both science and philosophy, Bohm's main concern was with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular. In this classic work he develops a theory of quantum physics which treats the totality of existence as an unbroken whole. Writing clearly and without technical jargon, he makes complex ideas accessible to anyone interested in the nature of reality.