David Bohm’s Physics

This is an excerpt from one of the presentations featured in the Pari Center’s event Radical Visions, in Pari on May 23-30, 2025.

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, PhD, taught physics at a range of schools in the UK. After attending the Liverpool Blue Coat School, he took his first degree in Natural Sciences at Cambridge, then gained a PhD in particle physics in 1989 at Liverpool University.

Shortly after this, he started work on Quarks Leptons and the Big Bang, now published by Taylor & Francis and available in its third edition, which was intended as a rigorous but accessible introduction to these topics. Since then, he has also written Apollo in Perspective, Quantum Reality (now in its second edition), and Space-time, co-authored a successful textbook and contributed to an encyclopaedia for young scientists.

He has also written on aspects of the history and philosophy of science. His most recent book is Introduction to Entropy: The Way of the World, co-authored with Simon Hands. Jonathan has also contributed to the updated edition of the Looking-Glass Universe co-authored by F. David Peat and John Briggs.