Louisville Process Theology Network

David Bohm and Infinity

From --- Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm

By F. David Peat

Page 36 -- “From very early on in his scientific career, Bohm trusted his interior intuitive display as a more reliable way of arriving at solutions. Later, when he met and talked with Einstein, he learned that he too experienced subtle internal muscular sensations that appeared to lie much deeper than rational and discursive thought.

Without explicitly knowing it at the time, Bohm had returned to the ancient maxim “as above, so below”, the medieval teaching that each individual is a microcosm of the macrocosm. Bohm himself strongly believed himself part of the universe, and that, by giving attention to his own feelings and sensations, he should be able to arrive at a deeper understanding of the nature of the universe. This particular skill remained with Bohm throughout his professional life.”

Deep Philosophical Questions in Physics

Page 203 -- From Bohm’s perspective “most physicists appeared to be uninterested in the deeper philosophical questions of their subject. To make matters worse, they even ignored the underlying physics they were studying, preferring the surface brilliance of mathematical techniques.

In most universities students were now taught quantum theory simply by copying down Schr?¶dinger’s equation from the blackboard and then learning how to perform calculations using it. Increasingly, Bohm found himself out of sympathy with the mainstream. His own interests were quite different and others had even come to regard him as a maverick.

Bohm liked to relate an anecdote about a seminar he once gave in Tel Aviv. At this seminar his audience was bewildered to discover they had missed the meat of his talk. In most talks a physicist introduces the topic in a general way, spending five or at most ten minutes on the overall approach, maybe even mentioning something of the philosophy of the subject. Then he or she gets down to the serious business of writing equations on the blackboard.

During the introduction the listeners are preoccupied with finishing their coffee and only come to attending when the real talk begins – that is, when the equations appear.

In Tel Aviv, Bohm talked for the customary ten minutes, then twenty minutes, and on into forty minutes without ever writing anything on the blackboard. The audience kept waiting for the real lecture to begin, and only in the last minutes of Bohm’s talk did they realize that he was not going to produce any equations and that what they had taken as mere introduction had been the entire lecture.”

Something Truly Radical

Page 204 – “At Bristol, Bohm still thought hard about reconciling Einstein’s theory relativity with quantum theory, an issue that remained intractable after several decades of work by the best minds in physics. Most physicists who wrestled with the problem thought of developing alternative theories and new ideas. Bohm realized, by contrast, that something truly radical was needed…

For Bohm, the task of reconciling the two was not a question of making modifications to one theory in order to bring it in line with the other. Neither did the situation call for ‘new mathematics’ or clever new ideas.

Rather, physics had to pause and delve deeply into the underlying order of these two cornerstones of twentieth-century physics. The significant issue was to discover an entirely new order to physics…

Bohm disagreed with the thesis of Thomas Kuhn’s ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.’ Writing on the history of science, Kuhn has postulated long periods of ‘normal science’ in which the ‘basic paradigm’ of existing physics is not questioned.

Only when scientific progress becomes blocked does a scientific revolution take place, and in it, the old paradigm is swept away (‘a paradigm shift’). By contrast, Bohm believed that all revolutions, whether scientific or political, are partial. The human mind and the human society work from fixed nonnegotiable positions that tend to be carried over unchanged during a so-called paradigm shift….

The transformation of scientific thinking became, in Bohm’s mind, inseparable from the wider question of the transformation of consciousness (that underlies physical structures). Bohm was now seeking a new order of physics – a quest that would occupy him for the rest of his life.”



Page 322 : The relationship between the tangible and the intangible in Bohm’s own words --- “The field of the finite is all that we can see, hear, touch, remember, and describe. This field is basically that which is manifest, or tangible.

The essential quality of the infinite, by contrast, is its subtlety, its intangibility. This quality is conveyed in the word ‘spirit’, whose root meaning is ‘wind or breath.’ This suggests an invisible but pervasive energy, to which the manifest world of the finite responds.

This energy, or spirit, infuses all living things, and without it any organism must fall apart into its constituent elements. That which is truly alive in living systems is this energy of spirit, and this is never born and never dies.”

Links

David Bohm's Science and Philosophy -- UK Network