Physicist who linked spirituality and science was ahead of his time

David Bohm was one of the most interesting and important physicists of the 20th century.

His efforts to integrate science and spirituality have recently inspired a documentary film about him, Infinite Potential: The Life and Ideas of David Bohm.

Easy to watch, it’s a concise and entertaining 70 minutes in length and, thanks to the Fetzer Memorial Trust, currently available for free on YouTube.

Bohm’s physics book Quantum Theory is still one of the best treatments available on the subject. His lifelong quest was to discern the true physical reality lying beneath the technical mathematical details of the theory.

He was ahead of his time in the way he insisted that quantum theory compels us to better conceive of the interconnectedness of everything. But to many it seemed foolish to want to take physics beyond a merely mathematical description of experimental results.

At the time, most physicists rejected the implications of Bohm’s modelling of nature, which posited physical connections between things that were superluminal: connections taking place at speeds faster than the speed of light.

A spiritual approach to reality embraces seeing reality as one undivided wholeness. Bohm argued that quantum theory made it no longer tenable for science to see the universe as composed of separate and independently existing parts.

For Bohm, quantum theory points to a fundamental reality of quantum interconnectedness. Many physicists would consider his attempt to think beyond the mathematics to a deeper reality as an unnecessary mystification. Yet Bohm didn’t stand alone.

As someone who insisted there is a reality that we are also capable of knowing, he stood in some good company. Einstein was the most famous of these realists. But key figures in the development of quantum theory were also realists, for example, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, Louis de Broglie, and John Stewart Bell.

The Infinite Potential documentary nicely chronicles the frosty reception given to Bohm’s 1952 scientific article in which, going beyond his earlier book, he suggested a new interpretation of quantum theory.

The film doesn’t get into the technical details involved in the controversy, but it certainly gets the viewer interested in Bohm’s notion of “quantum potential.” So, let me tell you a bit more.

In that infamous 1952 article, Bohm constructed a model of the electron in which it could be considered as having a definite underlying reality, with a definite position and momentum.

But this particle is connected to everything else by a “pilot wave” field. So, there are two definite realities, of both particle and wave, but the wave is what makes the particle highly responsive to its environment.

This interconnectedness then accounts for the strange behaviour of the electron in such iconic experiments as the double slit experiment, which famously exhibits the electron’s quantum behaviour.

However, for the electron to be informed by its pilot wave, it would have to receive information from this pilot wave at superluminal speeds. Because this conflicts with Einstein’s theory of relativity, Bohm’s model seemed to purchase an underlying, unifying reality in the universe’s structure at much too high of a cost.

Nonetheless, in retrospect, this apparently undesirable “spiritual” feature of Bohm’s theory cannot be avoided. Ongoing experimental investigations that use the latest technology have unveiled behaviour that seems to be unexplainable without some kind of superluminal connection.

Therefore, Bohm seems to have been far ahead of his time, as physicist Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder remarked during the July 18 panel discussion in an online streaming event for the film Infinite Potential.

Experiments today have progressed to the point where we are confronted by so much interesting technical data from probing the quantum realm, notes Dr. Hossenfelder, that we are compelled to ask the fundamental question about the meaning of it all.

If electrons, for example, are not guided by an invisible, superluminal pilot wave (the possibility that Bohm envisioned and showed to be mathematically tenable), then how can we explain all the detailed experimental confirmations of Bell’s theorem, which seems to suggest such superluminal connection?

At the very least, we are confronted with the most interesting and most fundamental problem of physics.

Bohm’s conviction, that we have to affirm the simple and beautiful truth of a deep universal interconnectedness, is remarkable for its persistent relevance.

The mathematics shows that a representation of superluminal phase entanglement is required to make sense of experimental observations. But what is the precise physical nature of the non-local connections that physicists have discovered?

Bohm remains a pioneer, not just for his work as an innovative physicist, but also for engaging in the serious philosophical investigations that today’s physics demands.