The Beyond Bohm 2024 series is oriented toward sharing unique and unusual perspectives that complement and amplify the work of David Bohm. Now in our fourth year, we are continuing that tradition with an array of new faces and presenters that we are especially excited about.
One year before his 1952 ‘hidden variables’ paper David Bohm presented a physical-ontological interpretation of standard (‘Copenhagen’) interpretation of quantum theory in his 1951 646-page textbook. He proposed that properties of quantum particles such as electrons ought to be seen as ‘opposing potentialities.’ They are ‘potentialities’ in the sense they typically do not exist in a well-defined sense before measurement and ‘opposing’ in the sense that if one measures, say, position accurately, one cannot measure momentum accurately at the same time in the same experimental situation (‘complementarity’). Bohm’s discussion is philosophically intriguing—for one thing he suggests that we cannot derive the macroscopic world (which we need to actualize the potentialities of quantum particles) from quantum theory. And yet the behaviour of the macroscopic, classical level can only be understood in terms of a quantum theory of its component molecules.