July 18, 2020 – Infinite Potential: Exploring the Life and Work of David Bohm—Summer Series 2020: 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. First, he knew what kind of physics he enjoyed working on; although 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. Second, Bohm was not only concerned with science, for him science was part of a larger picture involving society as a whole. During the Great Depression he had shifted from a strong commitment to individualism along the lines of the American Dream to a more socially inclined, even sympathetic, social view. As for physics, he began to work on plasma, which was inherited from the war effort, and then moved to the subject to which he would dedicate his entire life: the quest to understand the quantum world. Olival Freire Jr. presents and reflects on Bohm’s early stage of his mature life by looking for elements of continuity we may find in his whole life. Olival is a Professor of Physics and History of Physics at the Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil.

Length: 1 hour and 50 mins