Structuring Process in the Undivided Universe

Quantum Phoronomy; that is Quantum Non-mechanics.

David Bohm writes in his 1951 book “Quantum Theory” (p. 167):-  “The entire universe must, on a very accurate level, be regarded as a single indivisible unit in which the separate parts appear as idealisations permissible only on a classical level of accuracy of description.”  The challenge then is to find an accurate mathematical way to describe this situation.  As Eddington points out in his 1936 book, “Relativity Theory of Protons and Electrons”,  “The quantum formalism tells us how an incompletely separated object can be represented as a probability distribution over completely separated states.”  I will explain how this removes the ‘measurement problem’ and replaces materialism with the more primitive organic notion of process where activity or ‘energy’, rather than ‘matter’, is taken as basic.

This approach provides a way to understand Bohm’s implicate/explicate order in which emphasis is given to the emergence of different geometries (or phoronomies, a notion already used by Einstein in ‘Über den Äther,  Schw. Nat. Gesel. Verh. 105 (1924) 85-93).  I want to motivate intuitively why it is necessary to change the whole system of order and measure assumed in Euclidean geometry.  In this way I want to emphasise the role of algebra in the mathematical description in this approach, linking up with some more recent developments in symplectic, conformal and nil geometries.