David Bohm - Interview (1987)
David Bohm - Interview (1987)
David Bohm - Interview (1987)
htm
PATHWAYS OF CHANCE
David Peat's latest book Pathways of Chance is not only his autobiography but also an
exploration of the ideas that have fascinated him during his life.
Bucking this tide of modern physics for more than 30 years, Bohm
has been more than a gadfly. His objections to the foundations of
quantum mechanics have gradually coalesced into an extension of
the theory so sweeping that it amounts to a new view of reality.
Believing that the nature of things is not reducible to fragments or
particles, he argues for a holistic view of the universe. He demands
that we learn to regard matter and life as a whole, coherent domain,
which he calls the implicate order.
Bohm is perhaps best known for his early work on the interactions of
electrons in metals. He showed that their individual, haphazard
movement concealed a highly organized and cooperative behavior
called plasma oscillation. This intimation of an order underlying
apparent chaos was pivotal in Bohm's development.
During the Fifties and Sixties Bohm expanded his belief in the
existence of hidden variables that control seemingly random
quantum events, and from that point on, his ideas diverged more
and more from the mainstream of modern physics. His books
Causality and Chance in Modern Physics and Wholeness and the
Implicate Order, published in 1957 and 1980, respectively, spell out
his new theory in considerable detail. In the Sixties Bohm met the
Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, and their continuing
dialogues, published as a book, The Ending of Time, helped the
physicist clarify his ideas about wholeness and order.
Omni: Can you recall when you first experienced the sense of the
wholeness that you now express as the implicate order? Bohm: When
I was a boy a certain prayer we said every day in Hebrew contained
the words to love God with all your heart all your soul, and all your
mind. My understanding of these words, that is, this notion of
The notion of spin particularly fascinated me: the idea that when
something is spinning in a certain direction, it could also spin in the
other direction but that somehow the two directions together would
be a spin in a third direction. I felt that somehow that described
experience with the processes of the mind. In thinking about spin I
felt I was in a direct relationship to nature. In quantum mechanics I
came closer to my intuitive sense of nature.
Bohm: The main problem is that quantum mechanics gives only the
probability of an experimental result. Neither the decay of an atomic
nucleus nor the fact that it decays at one moment and not another
can be properly pictured within the theory. It can only enable you to
predict statistically the results of various experiments.
Physics has changed from its earlier form, when it tried to explain
things and give some physical picture. Now the essence is regarded
as mathematical. It's felt the truth is in the formulas. Now they may
find an algorithm by which they hope to explain a wider range of
experimental results, but it will still have inconsistencies. They hope
that they can eventually explain all the results that could be gotten,
but that is only a hope.
His objection was not merely that it was statistical. He felt it was a
kind of abstraction; quantum mechanics got correct results but left
out much that would have made it intelligible. I came up with the
causal interpretation [that the electron is a particle, but it also has a
field around it. The particle is never separated from that field, and
the field affects the movement of the particle in certain ways].
Einstein didn't like it, though, because the interpretation had this
notion of action at a distance: Things that are far away from each
other profoundly affect each other. He believed only in local action.
I didn't come back to this implicate order until the Sixties, when I got
interested in notions of order. I realized then the problem is that
coordinates are still the basic order in physics, whereas everything
else has changed.
Omni: Your key concept is something you call enfoldment. Could you
explain it?
Bohm: Yes, but not necessarily straight lines. They are a way of
mapping space and time. Since space-time may be curved, the lines
may be curved as well. It became clear that each general notion of
the world contains within it a specific idea of order. The ancient
Greeks had the idea of an increasing perfection from the earth to the
heavens. Modern physics contains the idea of successive positions of
bodies of matter and the constraints of forces that act on these
bodies. The order of perfection investigated by the ancient Greeks is
now considered irrelevant.
The most radical change in the notion of order since Isaac Newton
came with quantum mechanics. The quantum-mechanical idea of
order contradicts coordinate order because Heisenberg's uncertainty
principle made a detailed ordering of space and time impossible.
When you apply quantum theory to general relativity, at very short
distances like ten to the minus thirty-three centimeters, the notion of
the order of space and time breaks down.
Omni: Can you replace that with some other sense of order?
Bohm: First you have to ask what we mean by order. Everybody has
some tacit notion of it, but order itself is impossible to define. Yet it
can be illustrated. In a photograph any part of an object is imaged
into a point. This point-to-point correspondence emphasizes the
notion of point as fundamental in sense of order. Cameras now
photograph things too big or too small, too fast or too slow to be
seen by the naked eye. This has reinforced our belief that everything
can ultimately be seen that way.
Omni: So our image is the lens, the apparatus suggesting the point.
The point in turn suggests electrons and particles.
But let's put aside the hologram because that's only a static record.
Returning to the actual situation, we have a constant dynamic
pattern of waves coming off an object and interfering with the
original wave. Within that pattern of movement, many objects are
enfolded in each region of space and time.
About the time I was looking into these questions, a BBC science
program showed a device that illustrates these things very well. It
consists of two concentric glass cylinders. Between them is a viscous
fluid, such as glycerin. If a drop of insoluble ink is placed in the
glycerin and the outer cylinder is turned slowly, the drop of dye will
be drawn out into a thread. Eventually the thread gets so diffused it
cannot be seen. At that moment there seems to be no order present
at all. Yet if you slowly turn the cylinder backward, the glycerin draws
back into its original form, and suddenly the ink drop is visible again.
The ink had been enfolded into the glycerin, and it was unfolded
again by the reverse turning.
Omni: Suppose you put a drop of dye in the cylinder and turn it a
few times, then put another drop in the same place and turn it. When
you turn the cylinder back, wouldn't you get a kind of oscillation?
Bohm: Yes, you would get a movement in and out. We could put in
one drop of dye and turn it and then put in another drop of dye at a
slightly different place, and so on. The first and second droplets are
folded a different number of times. If we keep this up and then turn
the cylinder backward, the drops continually appear and disappear.
So it would look as if a particle were crossing the space, but in fact
it's always the whole system that's involved.
To us, that pulse looks like a big bang; In a greater context, it's a
little ripple. Everything emerges by unfoldment from the
holomovement, then enfolds back into the implicate order. I call the
enfolding process "implicating," and the unfolding "explicating." The
implicate and explicate together are a flowing, undivided wholeness.
Every part of the universe is related to every other part but in
different degrees.
Bohm: Yes, but the recent past is enfolded more strongly. At any
given moment we feel the presence of all the past and also the
anticipated future. It's all present and active. I could use the example
of the cylinder again. Let's say we enfold one droplet h times. Then
we put another droplet in and enfold it N times. The relationship
between the droplets remains the same no matter how thoroughly
they are enfolded. So as you unfold, you will get back the original
relationship. Imagine if we take four or five droplets--all highly
enfolded--the relationship between them is still there in a very subtle
way, even though it is not in space and not in time. But, of course, it
can be transformed into space and time by turning the cylinder. The
best metaphor might involve memory. We remember a great many
events, which are all present together. Their succession is in that
momentary memory: We don't have to run through them all to
reproduce that time succession. We already have the succession.
Omni: Descartes held mind and external reality together with God.
You're holding the two with meaning.
It seems that people are ready to wait twenty years for results if
you've got formulas. If there are no formulas, they don't want to
consider it. Formulas are means of talking utter nonsense until you
understand what they mean. Every page of formulas usually contains
six or seven arbitrary assumptions that take weeks of hard study to
penetrate.
Omni: That seems to fit in well with your thoughts about death.
Omni: The past you, then, has been snatched back into the implicate
order.
Bohm: That's right. Anything I know about "me" is in the past. The
present "me" is the unknown. We say there is only one implicate
order, only one present. But it projects itself as a whole series of
moments. Ultimately, all moments are really one. Therefore now is
eternity.
See also
Bohm Biederman Correspondence