Beyond Bohm 2025, Part 2 – Introduction to Bohm’s physics

Introduction to Bohm’s physics

with Jonathan Allday

Saturday August 2
9:00am PDT  | 12:00pm EDT  | 5:00pm BST  |  6:00pm CEST 
2-hour session.

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

David Bohm’s work in physics spanned a range of areas and interests, but he always came back to the foundations of quantum theory.

While his 1952 hidden variables papers were not really about hidden variables (it’s in quotes in the paper tiles), they did start a direction of travel that he periodically revisited. The quantum potential offered a new way of illustrating the profound differences between classical and quantum physics as well as a means of exploring Bohm’s vision of underlying wholeness.

The 1952 papers also profoundly influenced John Bell, who took up Bohm’s reworking of one of Einstein’s thought experiments to explore the nature of entanglement experimentally. That line led to the 2022 Nobel Prize. Without going into too much technical detail, I will explain the underlying physics of the 1952 papers, Bell’s theorem and its relationship to locality and entanglement, and will work up to the advances Basil Hiley was making right up to his death.

We might even mention the Aharonov-Bohm effect and how weird that is…

Jonathan Allday was born in Liverpool in 1960. He did his first degree in Natural Sciences at Cambridge in 1982 and then returned to Liverpool to complete a PhD in elementary particle physics. As part of this, he was fortunate to spend some time working at the European particle physics centre, CERN, in Geneva.

Also, during that time he was co-opted onto a working party looking at the teaching of particle physics in schools and universities. The upshot was a new syllabus in particle physics and cosmology to be added to UK A-level (16-18) physics qualifications. The first questions were set in 1992.

On the back of the work on this syllabus, Jonathan wrote his first book Quarks, Leptons and the Big Bang, which was published in 1998 and is about to enter its fourth edition. Jonathan has also collaborated on a couple of textbooks and written his own books on Quantum Theory, General Relativity and the Apollo moon missions.

Professionally, Jonathan worked as a physics teacher for 30 years in a variety of independent day and boarding schools in the UK. He was a head of physics, a head of science and latterly an academic deputy head. He retired in 2020 and now runs a consulting company providing training and educational advice for schools.

Jonathan is married to Carolyn, and they have three sons all of whom are far better at sport than he was. Carolyn was a GB swimmer, which explains how come the boys can do sport. Jonathan and Carolyn live in a hamlet not far from Worcester in the UK. When not writing or consulting, Jonathan enjoys watching cricket, James Bond movies and Formula 1 races.