DAVID BOHM, TIME OF BIRTH UNKNOWN FOR SURE.......

 

 

He never wanted his own children, because he was so depressed from his own childhood. So he & his wife never had any children.

 

He "found" Krishnamurti, and adopted him as a father figure, one he could look up to, (he admitted in his life long search on the psychiatrist couch,for easing of his depression)

 

Later in life, he became disenchanted for awhile, but then, accepting that "K" wasn't any more then he was, a man who had human like traits, not all which were commendable......

(perhaps doing one thing, while saying another),

 

David Bohm was not only a unique thinker, and peer of Albert Einstein, but he also was an "Idealist", (very rare these days)

 

I'll post a few YouTubes (5 minutes each?)....of various talks he & K had at the end of K's life, about "Perception" and Reality.

 

They start off rather slowly, but pick up into very interesting areas later on......

 

I'd suggest taking them in doses, (a few at a time)......to not get bored.

 

 

The death of David Bohm on 27 October 1992 is a great loss not only for the physics community but for all those interested in the philosophical implications of modern science. David Bohm was one of the most distinguished theoretical physicists of his generation, and a fearless challenger of scientific orthodoxy. His interests and influence extended far beyond physics and embraced biology, psychology, philosophy, religion, art, and the future of society. Underlying his innovative approach to many different issues was the fundamental idea that beyond the visible, tangible world there lies a deeper, implicate order of undivided wholeness.

David Bohm was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1917. He became interested in science at an early age; as a young boy he invented a dripless teapot, and his father, a successful businessman, urged him to try to make a profit on the idea. But after learning that the first step was to conduct a door-to-door survey to test market demand, his interest in business waned and he decided to become a theoretical physicist instead.

In the 1930s he attended Pennsylvania State College where he became deeply interested in quantum physics, the physics of the subatomic realm. After graduating, he attended the University of California, Berkeley. While there he worked at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory where, after receiving his doctorate in 1943, he began what was to become his landmark work on plasmas (a plasma is a gas containing a high density of electrons and positive ions). Bohm was surprised to find that once electrons were in a plasma, they stopped behaving like individuals and started behaving as if they were part of a larger and interconnected whole. He later remarked that he frequently had the impression that the sea of electrons was in some sense alive.

In 1947 Bohm took up the post of assistant professor at Princeton University, where he extended his research to the study of electrons in metals. Once again the seemingly haphazard movements of individual electrons managed to produce highly organized overall effects. Bohm's innovative work in this area established his reputation as a theoretical physicist.

In 1951 Bohm wrote a classic textbook entitled Quantum Theory, in which he presented a clear account of the orthodox, Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. The Copenhagen interpretation was formulated mainly by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the 1920s and is still highly influential today. But even before the book was published, Bohm began to have doubts about the assumptions underlying the conventional approach. He had difficulty accepting that subatomic particles had no objective existence and took on definite properties only when physicists tried to observe and measure them. He also had difficulty believing that the quantum world was characterized by absolute indeterminism and chance, and that things just happened for no reason whatsoever. He began to suspect that there might be deeper causes behind the apparently random and crazy nature of the subatomic world.

Bohm sent copies of his textbook to  Neils Bohr and Einstein. Bohr did not respond, but Einstein phoned him to say that he wanted to discuss it with him.

 In the first of what was to turn into a six-month series of spirited conversations, Einstein enthusiastically told Bohm that he had never seen quantum theory presented so clearly, and admitted that he was just as dissatisfied with the orthodox approach as Bohm was. They both admired quantum theory's ability to predict phenomena, but could not accept that it was complete and that it was impossible to arrive at any clearer understanding of what was going on in the quantum realm.

It was while writing Quantum Theory that Bohm came into conflict with McCarthyism. He was called upon to appear before the Un-American Activities Committee in order to testify against colleagues and associates. Ever a man of principle, he refused. The result was that when his contract at Princeton expired, he was unable to obtain a job in the USA. He moved first to Brazil, then to Israel, and finally to Britain in 1957, where he worked first at Bristol University and later as Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London, until his retirement in 1987. Bohm will be remembered above all for two radical scientific theories: the causal interpretation of quantum physics, and the theory of the implicate order and undivided wholeness

(whole article here)

 

excerpt:

 

We must learn to view everything as part of 'Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement' [3].

Another metaphor Bohm uses to illustrate the implicate order is that of the hologram. To make a hologram a laser light is split into two beams, one of which is reflected off an object onto a photographic plate where it interferes with the second beam. The complex swirls of the interference pattern recorded on the photographic plate appear meaningless and disordered to the naked eye. But like the ink drop dispersed in the glycerin, the pattern possesses a hidden or enfolded order, for when illuminated with laser light it produces a three-dimensional image of the original object, which can be viewed from any angle. A remarkable feature of a hologram is that if a holographic film is cut into pieces, each piece produces an image of the whole object, though the smaller the piece the hazier the image. Clearly the form and structure of the entire object are encoded within each region of the photographic record.

Bohm suggests that the whole universe can be thought of as a kind of giant, flowing hologram, or holomovement, in which a total order is contained, in some implicit sense, in each region of space and time. The explicate order is a projection from higher dimensional levels of reality, and the apparent stability and solidity of the objects and entities composing it are generated and sustained by a ceaseless process of enfoldment and unfoldment, for subatomic particles are constantly dissolving into the implicate order and then recrystallizing.

The quantum potential postulated in the causal interpretation corresponds to the implicate order. But Bohm suggests that the quantum potential is itself organized and guided by a superquantum potential, representing a second implicate order, or superimplicate order. Indeed he proposes that there may be an infinite series, and perhaps hierarchies, of implicate (or 'generative') orders, some of which form relatively closed loops and some of which do not. Higher implicate orders organize the lower ones, which in turn influence the higher.

Bohm believed that life and consciousness are enfolded deep in the generative order and are therefore present in varying degrees of unfoldment in all matter, including supposedly 'inanimate' matter such as electrons or plasmas. He suggests that there is a 'protointelligence' in matter, so that new evolutionary developments do not emerge in a random fashion but creatively as relatively integrated wholes from implicate levels of reality. The mystical connotations of Bohm's ideas are underlined by his remark that the implicate domain 'could equally well be called idealism, spirit, consciousness. The separation of the two -- matter and spirit -- is an abstraction. The ground is always one.' [4]

As with all truly great thinkers, David Bohm's philosophical ideas found expression in his character and way of life. His students and colleagues describe him as totally unselfish and non-competitive, always ready to share his latest thoughts with others, always open to fresh ideas, and single-mindedly devoted to a calm but passionate search into the nature of reality. In the words of one of his former students, 'He can only be characterized as a secular saint' [5].

Bohm believed that the general tendency for individuals, nations, races, social groups, etc., to see one another as fundamentally different and separate was a major source of conflict in the world. It was his hope that one day people would come to recognize the essential interrelatedness of all things and would join together to build a more holistic and harmonious world. What better tribute to David Bohm's life and work than to take this message to heart and make the ideal of universal brotherhood the keynote of our lives.

Personal insight into his personality:

 

 

David Bohm experienced a difficult childhood. Born in a Jewish family in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, he was raised mainly by his father, a furniture store owner and assistant of the local rabbi. Bohm held a negative opinion of his father and received little encouragement from his mother, who often suffered from mental illness. As a result, he sought inspiration in his own world and, at an early age, showed the character of a genuine truth-seeker.

From the beginning of his scientific career, Bohm placed more faith in intuition as a way of arriving at solutions than in the more common way of mathematics. When he arrived at Caltech in 1939, he found the campus disturbingly different from what he had expected. He encountered a world of competition that left little room for creative thinking and real physics. Peat writes that Bohm's roommate "believed that Caltech students learned physics through the act of problem-solving itself. But for Bohm, understanding always involved probing deeper and deeper into underlying assumptions" (p. 34). By this time, Bohm was accustomed to regarding all phenomena as flowing from a deeper level of existence and periodically withdrawing into that same unknown world. He showed familiarity with the Hermetic axiom: as above, so below.

He also believed that by paying attention to his own feelings and intuitions, he should be able to arrive at a deeper understanding of the nature of the universe of which he was part. He saw the universe as infinite and ineffable; he developed a vision of an infinite number of hierarchies within hierarchies, which made up what he called the implicate order. He found confirmation of his mystic vision on television in the 1960s, when he saw a device made of two concentric glass cylinders, the space between them filled with colorless glycerin. The experimenter put a drop of ink in the glycerin, and then turned the outer cylinder. As a result, the droplet was drawn out into a thread, which gradually became thinner and thinner until it vanished completely; the ink had disappeared but still existed in the glycerin. When the cylinder was turned in the opposite direction, the ink reappeared from its enfolded, hidden existence. Bohm realized that there was no disorder or chaos, but, rather, a hidden order.

Bohm's profound concern was the foundations of physics and quantum theory; he did not shy away from taboos and stick to the safety of accepted science, as so many scientists did and still do. As a result, he did not have an easy career. On many occasions he found himself neglected; he published several books that to his disappointment were often ignored by colleagues. Nor did he become a Nobel laureate, though he was a worthy candidate. Bohm also suffered great distress when forced by McCarthyism to leave his home country in the early '50s on account of the Marxist views he held at that time. He found refuge in Brazil, but had a hard time far away from home without friends and colleagues, and was subject to bouts of depression. He again found himself threatened, this time by a group of Nazi sympathizers who tried to scare him off the campus. The situation became so serious that the head of the faculty called for the assistance of a good friend of Bohm's: Albert Einstein. Einstein wrote a letter intended for publication to the Governor of the State of Sao Paulo:

[Bohm] has become deeply interested in the following questions. Is it really necessary to assume that the processes in the molecular domain are governed by chance? Is it not possible to explain the present theory in such a way as to indicate that everything should proceed by necessity, so that chance is, in principle, eliminated. . . . I have had in the past the greatest confidence in Dr. Bohm as a scientist and as a man, and I continue to do so. -- p. 148

Later, when living and working in Britain, Bohm suggested to his students that they experiment with a new language that consisted only of verbs, which he called the rheomode, in an effort to do justice to the transcendental nature of the world. He recognized that our earliest perceptions of the world are of transformation and flow, but that something happens to us by the time we reach adulthood; in his opinion, the culprit was language. Bohm's ideas on the rheomode are fascinating, but the response from many professional linguists was discouraging. However, in the last year of his life, he met with a group of Native Americans (Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Ojibwa, Micmaq, and Soto), and was struck by their strongly verb-based languages and their "process-based vision of the world."

In the 1970s Bohm met Krishnamurti and became involved in his movement. They had many discussions, and Bohm became trustee of one of his schools. However, his confidence in Krishnamurti was dented after the latter's death, when it emerged that, although he advocated celibacy, he had kept a mistress who had several abortions. These revelations contributed to the mental crisis Bohm was passing through at that time.

In the 1980s David Bohm and his wife, Saral, came in contact with the Dalai Lama, and they had several discussions. The Dalai Lama once joked that Bohm had become his physics teacher, although "when the lesson is over I forget everything" (p. 300). On one occasion, David Bohm fell ill and the Dalai Lama sent for his personal physician, who diagnosed Bohm's blood as too thick. The doctor said he would send to Dharamsala, India, for medication, but the Dalai Lama insisted that the treatment should begin immediately, and gave Bohm some special tablets to take. On another occasion he sent his personal physician to examine Bohm at his home in London.

David Bohm died in a taxi as he was being driven home from work. He had just been putting the finishing touches to a book on quantum physics, co-authored with his collaborator Basil Hiley. This book --The Undivided Universe (1993) -- marks the culmination of Bohm's life-long effort to develop an alternative interpretation of quantum physics, one which rejects the role of chance, and instead posits the existence of subtler forces acting from hidden, implicate levels of reality, in order to explain the sometimes puzzling behavior of the subatomic world. (2)

Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm is an inspiring book, well documented and illustrated. It presents a compelling picture of a great scientist, a man who dared to question orthodoxy and to introduce new and radical ideas into science, but who suffered neglect and misunderstanding, as so many truly great men have.

Fascinating Article, with drawings, (Pictures) of his theories "The Theory of Everything"

 

 

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PERHAPS? the beauty of David Bohm, couldn't have been realized, (his potential) without the childlike quality &  innocence he possessed, not unlike Albert Einstein's....to then see the world and the potential of everything, but yet this "naivite" was a double edged sword for him too!

 

Skeptical Inquirer, July, 2000, by Martin Gardner

My previous column was about the guided wave theory of David Bohm, and its growing acceptance by many of today's quantum theorists. In this issue I will sketch Bohm's sad life and his strange relationship with the Indian guru Jiddo Krishnamurti.

 

After learning about Krishnamurti's secret love affair with his best friend's wife, Bohm felt betrayed. Perhaps this plunged him into his third and final deep depression. Hospitalized, suffering from paranoia and thoughts of suicide, Bohm underwent fourteen episodes of shock therapy before he recovered sufficiently to leave the mental hospital. Earlier triple bypass surgery on his heart had been successful, but his death in 1991, at age 75, was from a massive heart attack. Krishnamurti had died six years earlier, at his home in Ojai, of pancreatic cancer. His body was cremated.

Bohm's creative work in physics is undisputable, but in other fields he was almost as gullible as Conan Doyle. He was favorably impressed by Count Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity, with the morphogenic fields of Rupert Sheldrake, the orgone energy of Wilhelm Reich, and the marvels of parapsychology. [1] For a while he took seriously Uri Geller's ability to bend keys and spoons, to move compasses, and produce clicks in a Geiger counter, all with his mind.

Bohm also flirted with panpsychism, the belief that all matter is in some sense alive with low levels of consciousness. "Even the electron is informed with a certain level of mind," Bohm said in an interview published in Quantum Implications: Essays in Honor of David Bohm (1987), edited by Basil Hiley and David Peat. Bohm's later writings swarm with neologisms such as holomovement, rheomode, levate, enfoldment, soma-significant, and implicate and explicate levels of reality.

In his biography of Bohm, David Peat tells how Bohm carried with him a key bent by Uri Geller as if it were a holy relic. When the key later disappeared, Bohm took this to be Geller's psychokinetic powers at work from a distance. When the key was found an hour later, he believed this to be another paranormal event! Bohm's close associate Basil Hiley at once recognized Geller as a charlatan. He often warned Bohm that if he appeared to endorse Geller it would damage their work. Bohm agreed to back away from Geller. As Hiley said to Peat, Bohm often had to be saved from idiots.

Bohm's Eastern metaphysics, even though it helped shape his interpretation of quantum mechanics, should not be held against the potential fruitfulness of his pilot wave theory. In a similar fashion Isaac Newton's Biblical fundamentalism and his alchemical research cast no shadows over his contributions to physics. Nor did Kepler's belief in astrology throw doubts on his great discoveries.

Einstein once said that his misgivings about the Copenhagen interpretation of QM came from something he felt in his little finger. For decades his intuitions were ridiculed by Bohr and his followers. They never ceased to express sorrow over how the great man had deserted them by refusing, in his senior years, to view QM as a beautiful, complete theory, in no need of being replaced or modified.

It is too bad that Einstein did not live to see an increasing number of top physicists, such as Roger Penrose, Jeffrey Bub, and John Bell, who suspected, and today suspect, that the old maestro may turn out to be right after all.

 

ASTROLOGY OF DAVID :

Was this "naivite? " found in Neptune 's opposition to Venus and his semi-square to Mars? probably the Venus opposition, as the Mars input would have been his psychicalness and it's implications and lifelong plaguing of health issues.(depression events which led to possible suicide attempts, or thoughts)from time to time.

But the "childlike" naivite which existed within, coupled with Mercury in Capricorn, (Scientific objectivity), helped keep him, a little in BOTH worlds... Mars in Virgo, (scrutinizing) did seem to be at contrast with Moon in Pisces (the love of the mystical)

There was enough of both world in his chart, and the world is a sadder place without David Bohm and his ideas........which live on.

 

 

 

 

 

ill have to make a note of that book, as it sounds like a great read.

 

very tough chart,so many oppositions,although some of the orbs are quite high .the house i immediatly focused on was the 9th it contains saturn which has the closest aspect of all with that opposition to venus in the 3rd, mercury in cap and the ruler of the 3rd being saturn.his suns ruler is in the 7th in gem so alot of planets deposit to mercury which is well placed ,its mercury's ruler ,that is where it becomes problematic,as the 9th is typically seen as the house of philosophy ,we see the hard aspects between saturn and venus as difficulty in love recieved ,perhaps also appreciation? a lack of proper appreciation from mass groups and circles. as venus is in the sign of the collective and the masses. i cant really see how from the chart he was incredibly guilible ? maybe that conjunction to neptune although it is quite wide?

 

I can't recall if it was me? who rectified the chart, and "guessed" at Scorpio Rising.........so the  houses are not certain.

 

BUT, I do think Pisces Moon is the "gullible" one.....because Pisces is so etheric, in it's very nature. Neptune tends to keep one foot into the "etheric realms" and the earth signs, stay grounded.

 

Albert Einstein, also had a Pisces Sun. , but no other planets in Pisces, so he TOO could successfully mix the grounding of science with the etheric(ness) of the other worldly.

 

 

yea i think your probably right ,maybe even a dash of overestimating other people with jupiter in the 7th?

 

having pluto opposite the sun and the sun square to mars couldnt have been easy atall.i know people with a pluto opposition to their sun and they always feel they are fighting against the world to show how capable they are.i have mars square sun ,it can contibute to a feeling of wanting to give up when you hit an obstacle.

 

the time on the top chart gives him saturn square ascendant i have that aspect and it might explain alot about why he maybe didnt acheive a high status. alot of fear is felt when trying to assert oneself.

 

i wonder if there are any notable fixed star aspects in his chart?

It looks to me, like his Sun is Trine the M/C POF , and Regulus?

 

It also appears that his North Node is Trine to the POF?

 

If so, that's a big deal for success in the material / academic world bringing recognition to a large extent, (more then most)perhaps.?

 

I wonder why the astrodienst chart doesn't show the Trine aspects here?

 

I'm seeing just close to the orb of 120 degrees.

 

I think the Pluto and Mars (square Sun), is the anger & fright that his father represented to him, causing him anguish all his life, from childhood and required years of psychoanalysis to fight off the depression.

 

Saturn can be seen as Father as of course SUN is.

 

 

yea i know what you mean, in the text about his growing up it said how he didnt recieve the support needed so he set about things his own way. i think this is common for sag placements,not getting something they need but having the ability to see a way forward encourages a feeling that they can expand upon certain areas of life.

 

pluto opposite north node .of course that would mean he has pluto conjunct south node. the south node is like a place we go to that we feel safe with ,as its from our past and known to us,i think having the sun opposite and conjunt the north node makes this tricky as it makes it a power play of energy going on inside him,wanting what is familiar but also wanting to shine.

 

its quite common to have the sun trine midheaven, but with pof and regulus there also, kind of cements it all ,making sure he is in the spotlight.i think sun >angle aspects amplify that the individual is seen in someway.i think this also shows that he can acknoledge how sucess is acheived by oneself as his father ran his own bussiness?

I found this info on his life, & apparently his family was a bit into mysticism ideas or concepts too.

 

http://www.spiritualmusings.net/forerunner.htm

 

So back to the holomovement or the "implicate order". The whole universe is a basic reality. Bohm and Hiley divide reality into supersystem, system, and subsystem. The subsystems are dependent on the systems that include them and they form a chain extending to the whole universe. This dependency is wholeness of form and denies the ability to provide a complete description - only God, the all-inclusive, can do that. Every system is in a supersystem so that any theory that claims it is complete has closed itself off from the unknown into which everything merges. And isn't this borne out by scientific investigation? Every theory is superseded; there is always an elusiveness about mental constructs that purport to explain existence and its processes. It will never be possible to explain everything until we ourselves are that "everything". But the search must go on for God must find Himself, reflected in all of the eternity He created.

In Bohm's thinking, everything is folded into everything; it is "implicate order". Reality as implicate means that any portion of it involves every other portion; each portion of reality contains information on every other portion. Out of the implicate order comes the "explicate order", apparently independent entities which we experience in our physical existence and believe to be real life, the only existence we can acknowledge until we are prompted to search behind it for the true reality.

If David Bohm had not been born with his particular matrix of energies that destined him to flow back and forth (his hourglass pattern) between science and religion, he may well have concentrated on one or the other, but destiny needed a reconciliation of the two and so another forerunner was born. Hopefully, his inclusiveness and his particular genius will spark many who read of his work to search beyond the mundane world and look for answers on the spiritual plane.

And this bio: ( I think his parents never had money, just lower middle class immigrants)

 

 

 

From Publishers Weekly
Dismissed by establishment scientists as a maverick or mystical rebel, American physicist David Bohm (1917-1992) sought a holistic physics, a unified vision of matter and mind, brain and consciousness.

 

 His search for an alternative quantum theory led him to formulate a cosmology depicting a universe of infinite levels, each qualitatively different yet part of an interconnected whole. In this brilliant intellectual biography, science writer Peat, Bohm's longtime friend and colleague, portrays an intensely cerebral man gripped by periods of crippling depression, who had an acute need of a guru or father figure, whether mentor J. Robert Oppenheimer or Indian philosopher/ teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, and who ultimately felt betrayed by each of them.

 

 Born in Pennsylvania to a Hungarian Jewish immigrant father and a manic-depressive mother of Lithuanian Jewish extraction, Bohm, who settled in London in the late 1950s, was a disillusioned Marxist thinker (he briefly joined the U.S. Communist Party in 1942) who bravely refused to name names to a Congressional witchhunt committee when called to testify in 1949. Peat's probing exploration of Bohm's quest for an "implicate order,"

 

 a deeper reality beneath the surface appearance of things, helps explain his influence on writers, artists, psychologists and philosophers as well as open-minded physicists

 

From Library Journal
Science writer Peat, who with Bohm coauthored Science, Order and Creativity (LJ 11/15/87), writes with compassion and warmth about the famous physicist.

 

 He covers Bohm's entire personal and professional lives (he died in 1992), from childhood as the son of a poor Jewish immigrant to becoming one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century.

 

 Much of Bohm's work  the development of plasma theory and subsequent work with solid-state physics, his famous hidden-variables interpretation of quantum mechanics?was worthy of a Nobel Prize.

 

 Einstein once spoke of Bohm as his intellectual successor, but because of his unconventional political views and the McCarthy blacklisting madness, he was forced to become an expatriate in Brazil.

 

We begin with a dedication to this great writer who lived from 1917 to 1992 from his co-author and friend F. David Peat, who wrote Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm. What follows is from the Introduction with permission from David Peat. Peat was a friend and colleague of Bohm for more than twenty years. Together they wrote an excellent and profound book, Science, Order, and Creativity.

ON THE AFTERNOON of October 27, 1992, David Bohm was at Birkbeck College, the University of London, putting the finishing touches on a book that would sum up his lifelong struggle to create an alternative quantum theory. At six-fifteen he telephoned his wife, Saral, to let her know he was about to leave. "You know, it's tantalizing," he said. "I feel I'm on the edge of something."' An hour later, just as his taxi pulled up outside his home, Bohm suffered a massive heart attack and died.

Those last words, with their sense of bordering on the unknown, exemplify the thrust of Bohm's life. The man Einstein once spoke of as his intellectual successor was always seeking to go beyond, to transcend, to ask that next question. He had the courage to pursue truth no matter where it took him, yet he was guided by a strong moral sense. Still, there were many paradoxes to Bohm's life. Once a confirmed Marxist who scrupulously avoided any taint of mysticism, he later devoted much of his time and energy to the Indian philosopher and teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti. Once inspired by the American Dream, he later stood trial for contempt of the U.S. Congress. At Princeton, the same year he seemed set for a Nobel prize; he was suddenly assailed as a "juvenile deviationist" of science whose work should be ignored by the scientific establishment.

Nonetheless, his scientific achievements were more than enough to assure his reputation. In California, during the war years, he developed the theory of the plasma-the fourth state of matter, in addition to the solid, liquid, and gaseous states. At Princeton he applied this theory to the way electrons move in a metal and set the stage for much of subsequent solid-state physics.

His textbook on quantum theory, written while still at Princeton, became a classic for its clarity, always relying on physical argument and philosophical principles to explain the quantum world, rather than falling back on abstract mathematical formulae. Later, at Bristol University in England, Bohm and his student Yakir Aharonov demonstrated a new and important way in which the quantum world transcends that of classical mechanics. The two physicists showed that an electron is affected by the presence of an electrical field even when, according to classical physics, it is totally shielded from that field. This effect, they argued, is central to quantum mechanics, implying that even quite distant objects can affect quantum processes. These nonlocal correlations have nothing to do with traditional forms of interaction (such as by fields or the exchange of particles); rather, they demand new concepts that go beyond the ideas of separation and distance. The prestigious scientific journal Nature editorialized that Aharanov and Bohm's work was worthy of a Nobel prize.

Bohm had also reformulated the paradox proposed by Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen (EPR) that attempted to retain "independent elements of reality" within the quantum world. In Bohm's version the meaning of this paradox became clearer and helped blaze the trail for what would later become an experimental test.

This experimental test was proposed by physicist John Bell in his famous theorem. But Bell himself had been led to develop this theorem after encountering Bohm's hidden variables version of quantum theory-in Bohm's 1952 papers, Bell later said, he had seen "the impossible done." Throughout the later decades of his life, Bohm sought a new order in physics. He proposed that the reality we see about us (the explicate order) is no more than the surface appearance of something far deeper (the implicate order). 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.

Bohm's notion of an implicate order extended his reputation outside the bounds of physics and drew the interest of writers, artists, psychologists, and philosophers. It was to this audience that Bohm directed much of his later work, lecturing and writing on the essential wholeness of nature and experience, deploring the fragmentation of our modern world, discussing the nature of creativity, and exploring the nature of thought and the structuring processes of the psyche.

So deeply have his ideas permeated the general culture that they are becoming part of the shared way we look at the world. Their influence can be found in areas as diverse as education, psychology, art, and literary criticism, appearing even in novels. Bohm became something of a guru to those seeking renewal through education and psychotherapy, or seeking to build new communities or understand the internal dynamics of society.

In spite of his considerable scientific reputation, Bohm did not always see eye to eye with his contemporaries. The major controversy of his life lay in his rejection of the conventional interpretation of quantum theory. After his contact with Einstein, Bohm proposed an alternative theory in which electrons are guided along paths by what he called the quantum potential. This "hidden variable" theory so offended the scientific establishment that it was met with not only rejection but sheer silence, which gave Bohm considerable pain. Although he went on to develop the theory further, moving away from strict determinism into something far more subtle, his work remained tainted as that of a scientific maverick .

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Bohm went ever deeper into the quantum theory, seeking to develop a theory of prespace that would make connections to Einstein's relativity. It was during this period that Bohm moved away from his earlier materialistic position. Attempting to remove the distinction between mind and matter; he proposed that information, like matter and energy, is one of the basic principles of nature; it is not a subjective assessment but an objective activity in the world. The more broadly his ideas ranged, however, the more rigid and hidebound the scientific community became.

At the end of his life, Bohm remained a scientific rebel. He rejected the current fashion of seeking closure in some "grand unified theory," in favor of a vision of nature's inexhaustibility, of a world of infinite levels. Bohm's world was holistic, as holistic as the unanalyzable interconnections of the quantum or his unified vision of matter and mind. Holism extended, he believed, into human psychology and society itself. He dreamed of developing a group mind, and spent his last years organizing dialogue circles in its pursuit.

Bohm lived for the transcendental; his dreams were of the light that penetrates. From early childhood he learned to escape into the world of the mind and the imagination. Yet his life was accompanied by great personal pain and periods of crippling depression. He never achieved wholeness in his own personal life, and the fruits of that life, which are still with us, were gained only at great sacrifice.