The Implicate Order: a new approach to reality

David Böhm, Dean R. Fowler

Laurence Bettany

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.

Paavo Pylkkänen

Dimitrios Galanis-Kolintzas

According to Bohm the whole scientific description of the Universe is governed by fragmentation of our perception of what reality is. Physics’ tendency of acknowledging the ultimate structure of matter in the elementary particles has caused a widespread fragmentary view of the Universe. Thus, Physics seems to be unable to conceive the “undivided wholeness of the universe” and to acknowledge in that Wholeness the common, single bed of the whole of reality. According to Bohm that single bed of nature, Implicate Order, is the single origin of both mind and matter. Inside the multidimensional Implicate Order, a universal enfoldment of everything prevails. The Implicate Order coheres deterministically to the Universe and the depths of its inwardness are totally unknown to us, since we humans are part of its wholeness too. Physics as a science provides us only with abstractive descriptions of the Universe, since science offers only abstractions from reality. These abstractive descriptions are what constitute the Explicate Order of the Universe. Thus, each belief we have that through the science of Physics we are able to arrive at an ultimate deciphering of the Universe is inherently illusive. The science of Physics can provide us with knowledge only in the fragmentary level of the Explicate, that means analyzable, Order of the Universe recognizing its cognitive limits in front of the Implicate Order. The laws that govern the Implicate Order of the Universe are unknowable and unanalyzable by man and in the depths of these laws Bohm insists that a final truth about reality cannot be fixed.

Tadashi Okamura

Sean M. Carroll

Quantum physics is not mystifying. Its implications may be mind-bending, and not yet fully understood, but the theory is illuminating. It is the best explanation of reality we have. And no, God does not play dice with the universe. Spanning the history of quantum discoveries, from Einstein and Bohr to the present day, this is the essential guide to the most intriguing subject in science. Carroll debunks the myths that have grown up around quantum physics, resurrects and reinstates the Many-Worlds Interpretation, and presents a new path to solving the apparent conflict between quantum mechanics and gravity. A magisterial tour, Something Deeply Hidden encompasses the cosmological and everyday implications of quantum reality. And, finally, it all makes sense.