David Bohm

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David Joseph Bohm (December 20, 1917 - October 27, 1992) was an American quantum physicist.

Born at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Bohm attended Pennsylvania State College, graduating in 1939 and then heading west to work with theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer, first at the California Institute of Technology for a year, and then at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with a few of Oppenheimer's other graduate students (Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, Joseph Weinberg, and Max Friedman, all of whom lived in the same neighborhood), Bohm became increasingly involved not only with physics, but with radical politics. Like many young idealists in the late 1930s (including Oppenheimer himself), Bohm and his colleagues gravitated to alternative models of society, and became active in organizations like the Young Communist League, the Campus Committee to Fight Conscription, and the Committee for Peace Mobilization (all of which the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover would brand as Communist fronts).

During World War II, the Manhattan Project mobilized much of Berkeley's physics research in the effort to produce the first atomic bomb. Though Oppenheimer had asked Bohm to work with him at Los Alamos, the top-secret laboratory established in 1942 to design the weapon, the head of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves, would not approve his security clearance, after tip-offs about Bohm's politics (Bohm's friend, Joseph Weinberg, had also come under suspicion for espionage). Bohm remained in Berkeley, teaching physics, before completing his Ph.D. in 1943, under an unusually ironic circumstance. -- According to Peat (see reference below, p.64), "[t]he scattering calculations [of collisions of protons and deuterons] that he had completed proved useful to the Manhattan Project and were immediately classified. Without security clearance, Bohm was denied access to his own work; not only would he be barred from defending his thesis, he was not even allowed to write his own thesis in the first place! To satisfy the university, Oppenheimer certified that Bohm had successfully completed the research." He would later, however, work on the theoretical calculations for the Calutrons at the Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, used to electromagnetically enrich uranium for use in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

After the war Bohm became an assistant professor at Princeton University, where he worked closely with Albert Einstein. In May 1949, at the beginning of the McCarthyism hysteria period, the House Un-American Activities Committee called upon Bohm to testify before it -- because of his previous ties to suspected Communists. But Bohm pleaded the Fifth amendment right to decline to testify, and refused to give evidence against his colleagues. In 1950 Bohm was charged for refusing to answer questions before the Committee and arrested. He was acquitted in May 1951 but Princeton had already suspended him, and after his acquittal refused to renew his contract. Bohm's colleagues sought to have his position at Princeton re-instated, and Einstein reportedly wanted Bohm to serve as his assistant, but the university did not renew the contract. Bohm then left for Brazil to take up a Chair in Physics at the University of São Paulo.

In 1955, he moved to Israel where he spent two years at the Technion at Haifa. Here he met his wife Saral, who became an important figure in the development of his ideas. In 1957 Bohm moved to the UK. He held a research fellowship at University of Bristol until 1961, when he became Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College of the University of London, post he held until his retirement in 1987.

Throughout his life, Bohm suffered from bouts of depression, which seemingly worsened with age. He underwent psychoanalysis with Patrick de Mare. In May 1991 he was admitted to the "old age psychiatry" - de Mare declared Bohm "suicidal". Bohm stayed in the hospital until the end of August 1991. He remained on "medication" (sertralin). (For details see F. David Peats's biography.)

Bohm made a number of significant contributions to physics, particularly in the area of quantum mechanics and relativity theory. While still a post-graduate at Berkeley he discovered the electron phenomenon now known as Bohm-diffusion. His first book, Quantum Theory published in 1951, was well-received by Einstein among others. However, Bohm became unsatisfied with the orthodox approach to quantum theory which he had written about in that book and began to develop his own approach (Bohm interpretation), a non-local hidden variable deterministic theory whose predictions agree perfectly with the quantum, indeterministic, ones. His work and the EPR argument became the major factor motivating John Bell's inequality, whose consequences are still being investigated. In 1959, with his student Yakir Aharonov, he discovered the Aharonov-Bohm effect, showing how a electro-magnetic field could affect a region of space in which the field had been shielded, although its vector potential did exist there. This showed for the first time that the vector potential, hitherto a mathematical convenience, could have real physical (quantum) effects. [Later, pre-discoverers emerged: Werner Ehrenberg and Rory Siday, who had published a paper a decade before. See Peat, page. 192.]

Bohm's scientific and philosophical views were inseparable. In 1959 he came across a book by the Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti. It struck him how his own ideas on quantum mechanics meshed with the philosophical ideas of Krishnamurti. Bohm's approach to philosophy and physics receive expression in his 1980 book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, and in the book Science, Order and Creativity. In his later years, he developed the technique that has become known as "Bohm Dialogue", in which equal status and "free space" form the most important prerequisites. He believed that if carried out on a sufficiently wide scale, such Dialogues could help overcome fragmentation in society.

David Bohm died in London, England on October 22 1992.

References

A biography of Bohm by F. David Peat: Infinite Potential: the Life and Times of David Bohm, Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1997. ISBN 0-201-40635-7.
For information on his work at Berkeley and his dealings with HUAC see Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller, New York: Henry Holt, 2002. ISBN 080506589X.
Bohm, David. Quantum Theory. New York: Dover. 1989, original publication 1951. ISBN 0-486-65969-0.
Bohm, David. Causality and Chance in Modern Physics. 1957. reprint Philadelphia: U of Pa Press, 1980. ISBN 0-8122-1002-6
Bohm, David. The Special Theory of Relativity. 1965. New York: W.A. Benjamin.
Bohm, David. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. 1980. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-7100-0971-2.
Bohm, David. Unfolding Meaning: a weekend of dialogue with David Bohm. ed Donald Factor. Gloucestershire: Foundation House. 1985. ISBN 0-948325-00-3
Bohm, David and F. David Peat. Science, Order and Creativity. London: Routledge.
Bohm, David. Thought as a System. London: Routledge.
Krishnamurti, Jiddu and David Bohm. Limits of Thought: Discussions. London: Routledge, 1999. ISBN 0-415-19398-2.
Quantum Implications: Essays in Honour of David Bohm. London: Routledge, 1987. Edited by B.J. Hiley and F. David Peat. ISBN 0-415-06960-2.
Bohm, David and B.J. Hiley. The Undivided Universe: An ontological interpretation of quantum theory. London: Routledge, 1993. ISBN 0-415-12185-X. final work.
Albert, David Z. "Bohm's Alternative to Quantum Mechanics", Scientific American, May, 1994.

External links

More about David Bohm's ideas on Dialogue at a site maintained to carry on his concepts of Dialogue.
Two groups on the internet address Bohm-Dialogue: The first discusses Dialogue as a Theory..
The second, TT, short for The Table. "does" Bohm Dialogue online through means of text, images, sounds, etc.
David Bohm and Krishnamurti . Skeptical Inquirer, July, 2000, by Martin Gardner.