David Bohm (1917–1992) is, in the physics textbook, the name behind the Aharonov-Bohm effect (1959) and occasionally the pilot wave theory (de Broglie-Bohm mechanics, 1952). What is not in the physics textbook: Bohm was Albert Einstein's preferred discussion partner on quantum foundations in Einstein's last years, lost his Princeton position in 1951 after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, went into Brazilian exile as a US passport holder (passport confiscated there), became Brazilian, later Israeli, finally British – and from the 1960s developed an independent ontology of the quantum world he called implicate order. For three decades he held an intense dialogue with the Indian teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti. Probably the densest marginalisation biography in the entire pattern series: political (McCarthy), professional (hidden variables were outside the mainstream until around 2000) and philosophical (the Krishnamurti dialogues were separated from the "real" Bohm).
Who was Bohm?
Born on 20 December 1917 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Hungary. Studied at Pennsylvania State University, then Berkeley from 1939. PhD 1943 under J. Robert Oppenheimer – with a peculiarity that later became symbolic: Bohm's doctoral thesis on the scattering of protons was classified during the Manhattan Project; Oppenheimer was not allowed for security reasons to countersign it. Berkeley awarded the PhD without formal submission of the thesis. Bohm's first publication – his dissertation – stayed secret for years.
In 1947 Bohm became Assistant Professor at Princeton University. His 1951 textbook Quantum Theory (Prentice-Hall) was described by Einstein, who worked a few hundred metres away at the Institute for Advanced Study, as the clearest available exposition of the standard teaching. Einstein invited Bohm to discussions. Out of these discussions grew Bohm's dissatisfaction with the Copenhagen interpretation – the dissatisfaction that led him in 1952 to the pilot wave theory.
1949–1951: HUAC, Princeton, exile
In 1949 Bohm was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The background was his brief membership in a communist student group in Berkeley in the late 1930s and his acquaintance with other Berkeley physicists (among them Joseph Weinberg, Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, Max Friedman), against whom similar hearings were running. Bohm invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify against colleagues. In November 1950 he was indicted for contempt of Congress, in May 1951 he was acquitted.
Princeton nevertheless terminated his contract at the end of 1950 – not because of the later acquittal but because of the mere indictment. Einstein tried to secure him a position at the Institute for Advanced Study; the IAS director at that time was Oppenheimer, Bohm's former doctoral supervisor, who had given testimony about other scientists before the same committee. The position did not materialise. On Einstein's express recommendation Bohm went in 1951 to Brazil to the University of São Paulo. On arrival his US passport was confiscated. Bohm became Brazilian citizen, in 1955 he moved to the Technion in Haifa, in 1957 to Birkbeck College in London, where he remained until his death in 1992. He became British citizen in 1959.
The McCarthy episode ended Bohm's physical career in the US mainstream. The man whose textbook Einstein had praised could not obtain an academic position in the United States after 1951. That is the political marginalisation layer, exceptionally well documented for the pattern series.
1952: The de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory
In January 1952 Bohm published in Physical Review in two communications under the title A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of "Hidden Variables" an alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation. The idea, which Louis de Broglie had proposed in 1927 but then withdrawn under pressure from the Copenhagen school: particles have a well-defined position at every moment and are guided by a pilot wave whose mathematics is given by the Schrödinger equation. There are thus hidden variables (the positions), and the wave function is a real, guiding physical quantity.
The theory reproduces all experimentally confirmed predictions of standard quantum mechanics exactly. It is not false – it is a different reading of the same mathematics. Its price: explicit non-locality. The pilot wave mediates between distant particles over arbitrary distances instantaneously; this is the point in the EPR experiment that John Bell will turn into his theorem in 1964.
Bohm's theory was rejected by the majority view of the physics community for decades – not because it had been empirically refuted (it has not been refuted to this day), but because of a mix of John von Neumann's famous 1932 impossibility proof (which could have been recognised as flawed already at the time of Bohm's publication and was definitively shown to be flawed by Bell in 1966), philosophical preferences for the Copenhagen interpretation, and – not least – Bohm's contemporary political status as a HUAC defendant in exile. Only since the 1990s has Bohmian mechanics been pursued again as a serious mainstream research direction in physics (Dürr, Goldstein, Zanghì and others).
1959: The Aharonov-Bohm effect
In 1959 Bohm published, together with his then doctoral student Yakir Aharonov, in Physical Review, a thought experiment that later became one of the most striking experimental results of quantum mechanics. The claim: charged particles experience a measurable phase shift in regions where the electromagnetic field is zero but the vector potential is non-zero. The vector potential – in classical physics only a mathematical auxiliary – is in quantum mechanics a physically real quantity.
The effect has been confirmed experimentally several times, most strikingly in 1986 by Akira Tonomura with electron interferometry on superconducting rings. The Aharonov-Bohm effect today stands in every quantum mechanics textbook – as "Bohm" without the Bohm background. Anyone looking it up learns nothing about the fate of its co-discoverer.
1961: The first meeting with Krishnamurti
In spring 1961 Bohm in London read Krishnamurti's book The First and Last Freedom (1954). He was impressed by the clarity of the subject-object analysis and made contact with the Indian foundation. In May 1961 the two met for the first time in Wimbledon. From this meeting grew a more than thirty-year conversational relationship, with regular meetings in London, at Brockwood Park (Hampshire) and at Saanen (Switzerland).
Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) was an unusual figure: as a boy in India he was chosen by the Theosophical Society as the future "World Teacher"; in 1929 he publicly broke with the Society and spoke for the rest of his life without institutional affiliation about the question how individual consciousness can recognise and overcome the conditionings in which it operates. Krishnamurti had no theoretical doctrine, no system, no creed – he conducted enquiry dialogues.
What does a quantum physicist have in common with such a teacher? In Bohm's view: the same question. Who observes reality? How does what we call "subject" and "object" constitute itself? How does it come about that a fundamental world (quantum field, implicate order) presents itself to us as a world of discrete objects? Krishnamurti put this question on the side of consciousness; Bohm put it on the side of physics. Both men saw in their conversations a common enquiry space. The dialogues have been published in various forms from 1985 onwards, most famously as The Ending of Time (Harper, San Francisco 1985).
Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980)
In 1980 Bohm published with Routledge his philosophical-physical main work Wholeness and the Implicate Order. It is an attempt to formulate an ontology for quantum physics that does justice to the experimental record (non-locality, quantum entanglement) and at the same time overcomes classical materialist atomism.
The central distinction is between explicate order and implicate order. The explicate order is the world of discrete, mutually separated objects in space and time – the world as we ordinarily perceive it and as it is described in classical physics. The implicate order is the underlying, "enfolded" reality in which every part contains the whole within itself – Bohm uses the image of the hologram: if a photographic hologram plate is cut into pieces, each piece contains the whole image (only blurred). Reality, says Bohm, is holographic in a broader sense: every local phenomenon unfolds from a global, enfolded depth structure.
The dynamic connection between the two orders Bohm calls holomovement: the uninterrupted process of enfolding and unfolding that mediates between implicit and explicit reality. Matter and consciousness are both aspects of this one movement. This thesis is the direct quantum-continuation of Wolfgang Pauli'sunus mundus and of Schrödinger's Vedantic position – formulated with an additional mathematical apparatus from quantum field theory.
"We have to give up the notion that the world is constituted of basic objects or building blocks. (…) The new form of insight can perhaps best be called undivided wholeness in flowing movement. This view implies that flow is, in some sense, prior to that of the things that can be seen to form and dissolve in this flow."
— David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, ch. 1 (1980).
Bohm and Bell's theorem
John Bell – the Irish-born CERN physicist who in 1964 developed the theorem named after him – has stated publicly several times that his work would not have come about without Bohm's pilot wave theory. In his famous paper "On the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox" (1964) he names Bohm's 1952 construction as the starting point of his reflections. Bell argued throughout his life against the majority view that Bohm was not to be taken seriously: "The pilot-wave picture is far more reasonable than the Copenhagen interpretation."
The empirical closing of the Bell inequality from 2015 onwards (loophole-free experiments by Hensen, Giustina, Shalm) has opened the mainstream picture of quantum foundations so far that Bohm's hidden variables theory is today again regarded as a serious interpretation of quantum mechanics. It is compatible with today's data; it has not been refuted. With this, one of the three marginalisation layers of Bohm – the professional rejection of pilot wave theory – has effectively been withdrawn in the 21st century. The other two (political biography, philosophical Bohm) are still little visible.
On Dialogue – the last writing
In the last years of his life Bohm developed out of the Krishnamurti conversations an independent methodology that he called Bohmian Dialogue: a procedure of group conversation without a fixed leader, without an agenda, without consensus pressure, in which the participants are to let their own presuppositions become visible. The short text On Dialogue was published posthumously by Routledge in 1996. It has had its own reception history in organisational development and mediation – again separated from the history of physics.
Position in the pattern
Bohm is in our series the case with the highest marginalisation density. Three mutually independent layers interlock:
- Political: The HUAC indictment in 1950 and the Princeton dismissal ended Bohm's US career. The political marginalisation here is for once well documented (FBI files, Princeton correspondence, Einstein letters). Comparable only to the Witchcraft trial against Helen Duncan in 1944 in our article on Mediumship and Power – except that Bohm was a physicist, not a medium.
- Professional: The hidden variables theory of 1952 stood almost four decades outside mainstream quantum physics. Only Bell (1964) and the experimental closing of the Bell inequality (2015) brought it back. Bohm did not live to see this rehabilitation; he died in 1992.
- Philosophical: The implicate-order books and the Krishnamurti dialogues are treated, in the academic Bohm image, as "the later philosophy" separated from "the real physicist". The same editorial-separating reception pattern we see with Schrödinger's Vedantic writings, only denser.
With Bohm the pattern series stands in its most complex form. He is at once: political dissident, professionally rehabilitated hidden-variables pioneer, philosophical Krishnamurti dialoguer, and founder of an independent ontology of the quantum world. Each of these layers contributed independently to his marginalisation. Anyone who reads him honestly must put all three back together.
What remains
- Einstein's discussion partner. Bohm was in the early 1950s the quantum theorist with whom Einstein discussed foundations. This biographical fact alone refutes the narrative that the hidden variables tradition was an outsider idea.
- Bell's theorem 1964 rests on Bohm. Whoever cites Bell as a "counter-argument against hidden variables" has misunderstood him. Bell said publicly: hidden variables are compatible with the data, provided one accepts non-locality – which Bohm had explicitly assumed in 1952.
- Aharonov-Bohm effect is in the textbook. That is the one point at which Bohm has come through into mainstream physics. He stands there as a fact, not as a biography. Anyone who learns it learns nothing about McCarthy, Krishnamurti or the implicate order.
- The Krishnamurti dialogues are not a late phenomenon. The relationship begins in 1961, lasts until 1986 (Krishnamurti's death), and thus covers almost the entire Birkbeck period of Bohm. It is not an age-related development but part of his most active research phase.
- Line to Pauli and Schrödinger. Bohm's implicate order is the direct quantum-variant of Pauli'sunus mundus and Schrödinger's singular consciousness. Three generations of quantum pioneers, three languages, one common depth thesis: the fundamental reality is an undivided one, of which the separated objects and consciousnesses are aspects.
- Bridge into the 21st century. Bohm's line is continued today by Brian Josephson (Cavendish, Mind-Matter Unification Project) and by the renaissance of Bohmian mechanics (Dürr, Goldstein, Zanghì). For the institutional background see our article on Mediumship and Power.
Including Bohm means reading six tightly bound layers simultaneously: standard quantum mechanics (textbook 1951), hidden variables (1952), the Aharonov-Bohm effect (1959), the Krishnamurti dialogues (1961 onwards), the implicate-order ontology (1980), the dialogue methodology (posthumous 1996). These six layers are not peripheral to each other; they are the one work of a man who for over forty years pursued quantum physics and consciousness research as one investigation. The textbook cuts this work into two halves and assigns each half to a different discipline. Bohm belongs in the middle between these halves, not in one of them.
Sources
- F. David Peat: Infinite Potential. The Life and Times of David Bohm. Addison-Wesley, Reading 1997 – the standard history-of-science biography.
- Olival Freire Jr.: David Bohm. A Life Dedicated to Understanding the Quantum World. Springer, Cham 2019 – the more recent history-of-science monograph with detailed analysis of the FBI files and the Brazilian exile period.
- David Bohm: Quantum Theory. Prentice-Hall, New York 1951 – the standard interpretation textbook praised by Einstein.
- David Bohm: A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of "Hidden Variables", I & II. Physical Review 85, 1952.
- David Bohm: Causality and Chance in Modern Physics. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1957.
- Yakir Aharonov & David Bohm: Significance of Electromagnetic Potentials in the Quantum Theory. Physical Review 115, 1959.
- David Bohm: Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1980.
- David Bohm & F. David Peat: Science, Order, and Creativity. Bantam, New York 1987.
- David Bohm & Basil J. Hiley: The Undivided Universe. An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory. Routledge, London 1993 (posthumous).
- David Bohm: On Dialogue. Ed. Lee Nichol, Routledge, London 1996 (posthumous).
- J. Krishnamurti & David Bohm: The Ending of Time. Harper & Row, San Francisco 1985.
- John S. Bell: Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics. Cambridge University Press 1987 – with the detailed appreciation of Bohm.
- Detlef Dürr & Stefan Teufel: Bohmian Mechanics. The Physics and Mathematics of Quantum Theory. Springer, Berlin 2009 – today's mathematical standard reference for Bohmian mechanics.