Events

Having just completed a film on David Bohm’s life, his incredible work in physics, philosophy and the nature of consciousness, the question that Paul asked himself was, how come I never before heard about this extraordinary man and his work?

When David Bohm arrived in California in the early 1940s for graduate studies he had already consolidated two intellectual trends which would characterize his whole life. He knew what kind of physics he enjoyed working on; while he was attracted to theoretical physics and had exhibited skills in mathematics, he had no patience for the solving problem style of physics he had found at Caltech. Instead he looked for speculative and conceptual science. Bohm, however, was not only concerned with science, for him science was part of a larger picture involving society as a whole.

Chris Dewdney will review a selection of the animations that he originated during the period from 1979, when the Two-Slit calculations were first published, up to the more recent field-matter interaction examples. The animations will be shown (many in the updated form seen in the documentary Infinite Potential) during his talk and he will explain in a non-technical way, how they were produced and exactly what they show. For each animation, the implications for our understanding of quantum mechanics and the nature of reality will be drawn out.

Experimental evidence clearly shows classical physics is wrong. Sure, it works at the classical level, but there is some deeper order necessary to understand the new physics. Nevertheless this deeper process must approximate to the macroscopic world we experience.  David Bohm suggested that the algebraic quantum formalism should be understood in terms of the implicate order. For him this was the order that we directly perceive and from our experiences we abstract an array classical orders, the explicate orders from which we construct the an order which allows us to find a way to survive.

Bohm’s notion of implicate order resonates with the Eastern notion of Dao. Dao is the invisible current that brings the ‘ten thousand things’ to manifestation, but it is also described as the attractor that calls them back to return to their root, to no-thingness, to the unmanifest. And ultimately these two states, the manifest, the explicate, that which can be named, and the unmanifest, the implicate, that which has no name, are one and the same. Holding them together in our awareness is, Laozi tells us, the ultimate secret, the door of all mysteries.

The main reason we are divided in politics is not only polarization between parties, or fragmentation within the parties, but because of how we think. We tend to think in partial fragments, not in contextual wholes. David Bohm was keenly aware of this. Bohm was also aware that this lack of coherency was not necessarily the case in Indigenous cultures that have a history of shared meaning and participatory consciousness. In the USA, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy had a profound effect on the very idea to unite the states and also on the foundational values of liberty, equality, and natural rights enshrined in the US Constitution—and then on the unwritten rules of engagement that govern political protocols.