​David Bohm


see also Inter-Becoming

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John Cobb on David Bohm
I find the example of David Bohm instructive. He devoted many years to developing a process model to replace the substantive ones that are still in use. He sometimes called his new model holographic since it was based on a radical doctrine of internal relations. In this respect it is highly congenial to process thought. Each entity, instead of being self-enclosed, is seen as fragmentarily containing all the others. Bohm could make sense of many quantum phenomena in this way. Before he died, he completed, together with Hiley, a comprehensive theory that can account for all the known facts in a far less paradoxical fashion than had been thought possible.

- John Cobb, The Potential Contribution of Process Thought, June 24, 2003
David Bohm on the Implicate Order
The quantum theory is, without doubt, the most revolutionary development in modern physics. Unfortunately, a large part of its potential impact on our overall world view has been lost sight of, because it is generally treated as being nothing more than a calculus, for which no general imaginative conception is thought to be possible. The main emphasis in working with this theory has therefore been on the development of a mathematical formalism that can predict the widest possible range of experimental results. In this talk I shall, however, describe in general terms how the quantum theory, understood somewhat more imaginatively than is usually done, can point to a new order in physics, which I call the enfolded order, or the implicate order.

- David Bohm, The Implicate or Enfolded Order: A New Order for Physics by David Bohm. for entire article click here

Documentary on David Bohm

Film Trailer

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ABOUT THE FILM
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​He was one of the 20th Century’s most brilliant physicists. Albert Einstein called him his spiritual son. The Dalai Lama relied upon him as his “science guru.” So why is it that hardly any of us know the name: David Bohm?

By telling the little-known story of David Bohm and evoking the realms he explored in his research, INFINITE POTENTIAL takes us on a mesmerizing and immersive journey into the mystery of Consciousness––through the use of hypnotic music and rich visual tapestries. The film includes interviews with luminaries such as H.H. the Dalai Lama, esteemed artist Antony Gormley, Oxford philosopher and physicists Sir Roger Penrose, and many more who were influenced by Bohm’s revolutionary work.

Growing up in a poor Pennsylvania coal-mining town during the Great Depression, David Bohm possessed a rare and maverick intelligence that baffled his parents and peers. After earning a scholarship to go to college, Bohm got the attention of the greatest minds in science, including Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the Atomic Bomb, who became his thesis advisor but would eventually turn against him.

Bohm’s explorations led him to intuit a hidden order to reality––the Quantum Potential––that underlies both the microscopic world of subatomic particles and also the macro world of stars and galaxies. Bohm had turned to Eastern thought and the wisdom traditions of India to talk about something that underlies all of creation––a realm that mystics have known about for millennia and modern science is only just beginning to explore. Bohm’s revolutionary ideas were way ahead of their time––a threat to the scientific orthodoxy. And that’s why he was dismissed.
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Today, University College London and the University of Toronto are conducting experiments to prove the existence of the Quantum Potential, which could revolutionize human thought, our relationship to the planet––and David Bohm could well become a household name.


David R. Griffin on David Bohm​

Abstract. David Bohm's developing postmodern thought (combining precision and wholeness) is seen to contain two tendencies. One is a vision of “underlying wholeness,” in which all causation is vertical, and the implicate‐explicate relation is ubiquitous. This provides a possible solution to certain problems, but creates many others involving freedom, causation, and time. Second, many of Bohm's statements suggest that his deepest intuitions could be formulated without those problems in terms of the distinctions developed in Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of “prehensive wholeness,” in which the ubiquity of creativity would require a more restricted use of the implicate‐explicate relation.

​Physics and the ultimate significance of time : Bohm, Prigogine, and process philosophy / edited by David Ray Griffin

Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time challenges the conventional view of the nature of time. The dominant twentieth-century view, supported by Einstein and many of the founders of quantum theory, implies that time is ultimately unreal. Several new schools of thought reject the notion that physics is temporally symmetrical, and that time could just as easily run backwards. Combating this conventional view of time, this book offers three new viewpoints and explores their apparent differences.

Nobel prize winner Ilya Prigogine argues that irreversibility and asymmetry are more fundamental than reversibility and symmetry. David Bohm notes that while conventional notions about physics and the worldview it suggests have been based upon exclusive attention to the 'explicate order, ' quite another view results when primary attention is focused on the 'implicate order.' And the growing school of process philosophy based on Alfred North Whitehead's work holds that irreversible temporal relations characterize the most 'elementary' components of the world, implying the heretical view that time exists for a single electron or atom.

John Cobb and David Bohm Interview, 1984

Open Horizons