David Bohm Quotes (1917-1992)

“Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty because even in the vacuum matter is one; and if we don't see this, it's because we are blinding ourselves to it.”

“Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture and therefore eventually in society.”

“What we are proposing here is that this disparity between physical concepts (e.g. particle, wave, position, momentum) and the implications of the mathematical equations arises because the physical concepts are inseparably involved with the Cartesian notion of order, and this violates the essential content of quantum mechanics. What we need is a notion of order for all our concepts, both physical and mathematical, which coheres with this content.”

“Man's general way of thinking of the totality, i.e. his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself. If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken and without border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.”

“For several centuries, there has been a strong feeling that nonlocal theories are not acceptable in physics. ...Newton felt very uneasy about action-at-a-distance and... Einstein regarded it as 'spooky'. But... one can see nothing basically irrational about such an idea. Rather it seems to be most reasonable to keep an open mind on the subject and therefore allow oneself to explore this possibility. If the price of avoiding nonlocality is to make an intuitive explanation impossible, one has to ask whether the cost is not too great.”

“The entire universe must, on a very accurate level, be regarded as a single indivisible unit in which separate parts appear as idealisations permissible only on a classical level of accuracy of description. This means that the view of the world being analogous to a huge machine, the predominant view from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, is now shown to be only approximately correct. The underlying structure of matter, however, is not mechanical. This means that the term "quantum mechanics" is very much a misnomer. It should, perhaps, be called "quantum nonmechanics".”

“The entire universe must, on a very accurate level, be regarded as a single indivisible unit in which separate parts appear as idealisations permissible only on a classical level of accuracy of description. This means that the view of the world being analogous to a huge machine, the predominant view from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, is now shown to be only approximately correct. The underlying structure of matter, however, is not mechanical. This means that the term "quantum mechanics" is very much a misnomer. It should, perhaps, be called "quantum nonmechanics".”

“Even though the Lorentz theory is no longer generally accepted today, it is worthwhile to study it in some detail, not only because it helps to provide an appreciation of the historical context out of which the theory of relativity arose, but much more because it helps us to understand the essential content of Einstein’s new approach to the problem. Indeed, a critical examination of the Lorentz theory leads one, on the basis of already familiar and accepted physical notions, to see clearly what is wrong with the Newtonian concepts of space and time, as well as to suggest a great many of the changes needed in order to avoid the difficulties to which these concepts lead. Lorentz began by accepting the assumption of an ether. However, his basic new step was to study the dependence of the process of measurement of space and time on the relationship between the atomic constitution of matter and the movement of matter through the ether.”

“In the early 1950s, [...] there were two important advances in the interpretation of quantum mechanics, both made by the American physicist David Bohm. Just as there were, it seems, two Bohrs, there were apparently two Bohms: a 1951 Bohm and a 1952 Bohm.”

“Dave always arrives at the right conclusions, but his mathematics is terrible. I take it home and find all sorts of errors and then have to spend the night trying to develop the correct proof. But in the end, the result is always exactly the same as the one Dave saw directly.”

“According to Bohm, the ground of the cosmos is not elementary particles but pure process, a flowing movement of the whole. Within this implicate order, Bohm believed, one could resolve the Cartesian split between mind and matter, or between brain and consciousness.”

“The universe according to Bohm actually has two faces, or more precisely, two orders. One is the explicate order, corresponding to the physical world as we know it in day-to-day reality, the other a deeper, more fundamental order which Bohm calls the implicate order. The implicate order is the vast holomovement. We see only the surface of this movement as it presents or "explicates" itself from moment to moment in time and space. What we see in the world — the explicate order — is no more than the surface of the implicate order as it unfolds. Time and space are themselves the modes or forms of the unfolding process. They are like the screen on the video game. The displays on the screen may seem to interact directly with each other but, in fact, their interaction merely reflects what the game computer is doing. The rules which govern the operation of the computer are, of course, different from those that govern the behavior of the figures displayed on the screen. Moreover, like the implicate order of Bohm's model, the computer might be capable of many operations that in no way apparent upon examination of the game itself as it progresses on the screen.”