Quantum Bohmian Mechanics: David Bohm
The Wave Structure of Matter (WSM) explains David Bohm's pilot wave & hidden variables of Bohmian Mechanics as Spherical In Wave determining future position of wave center 'particle'. Biography, Pictures, Quotes.
Introduction: David Bohm
(David Bohm 1917 - 1992) The quantum theory, as it is now constituted, presents us with a very great challenge, if we are at all interested in such a venture, for in quantum physics there is no consistent notion at all of what the reality may be that underlies the universal constitution and structure of matter. Thus, if we try to use the prevailing world view based on the notions of particles, we discover that the 'particles' (such as electrons) can also manifest as waves, that they move discontinuously, that there are no laws at all that apply in detail to the actual movements of individual particles and that only statistical predictions can be made about large aggregates of such particles. If on the other hand we apply the world view in which the world is regarded as a continuous field, we find that this field must also be discontinuous, as well as particle-like, and that it is as undermined in its actual behaviour as is required in the particle view of relation as a whole. (David Bohm, On Quantum Theory, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980)
Under construction - To be completed by late 2018
Quantum Physics: Hidden Variables of Bohmian Mechanics
Bohmian mechanics, which is also called the de Broglie-Bohm theory, the pilot-wave model, and the causal interpretation of quantum mechanics, is a version of quantum theory discovered by Louis de Broglie in 1927 and rediscovered by David Bohm in 1952. It is the simplest example of what is often called a hidden variables interpretation of quantum mechanics. In Bohmian mechanics a system of particles is described in part by its wave function, evolving, as usual, according to Schrödinger's equation. However, the wave function provides only a partial description of the system. This description is completed by the specification of the actual positions of the particles. The latter evolve according to the "guiding equation," which expresses the velocities of the particles in terms of the wave function. Thus, in Bohmian mechanics the configuration of a system of particles evolves via a deterministic motion choreographed by the wave function. In particular, when a particle is sent into a two-slit apparatus, the slit through which it passes and where it arrives on the photographic plate are completely determined by its initial position and wave function.
Bohmian mechanics inherits and makes explicit the nonlocality implicit in the notion, common to just about all formulations and interpretations of quantum theory, of a wave function on the configuration space of a many-particle system. It accounts for all of the phenomena governed by nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, from spectral lines and scattering theory to superconductivity, the quantum Hall effect and quantum computing. In particular, the usual measurement postulates of quantum theory, including collapse of the wave function and probabilities given by the absolute square of probability amplitudes, emerge from an analysis of the two equations of motion - Schrödinger's equation and the guiding equation - without the traditional invocation of a special, and somewhat obscure, status for observation.
(plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/)
Under construction - To be completed by late 2018
David Bohm Quotes: Quantum Physics
In relativity, movement is continuous, causally determinate and well defined, while in quantum mechanics it is discontinuous, not causally determinate and not well defined. Each theory is committed to its own notions of essentially static and fragmentary modes of existence (relativity to that of separate events, connectable by signals, and quantum mechanics to a well-defined quantum state). One thus sees that a new kind of theory is needed which drops these basic commitments and at most recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails in unbroken wholeness. (David Bohm, On Quantum Mechanics, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980)
At present quantum physicists tend to avoid the issue by adopting the attitude that our overall views concerning the nature of reality are of little or no importance. All that counts in physical theory is supposed to be the development of mathematical equations that permit us to predict and control the behaviour of large statistical aggregates of particles. Such a goal is not regarded as merely for its pragmatic and technical utility: rather, it has become a presupposition of most work in modern physics that prediction and control of this kind is all that human knowledge is about. (David Bohm, On Modern Physics, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980)
One is led to a new notion of unbroken wholeness which denies the classical idea of analyzability of the world into separately and existing parts … We have reversed the usual classical notion that the independent ‘elementary parts’ of the world are the fundamental reality, and that the various systems are merely particular contingent forms and arrangements of these parts. Rather, we say that inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality, and that relatively independent behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within this whole. (David Bohm, On the Intuitive Understanding of Nonlocality as Implied by Quantum Theory, Foundations of Physics, vol 5, 1975)
The main problem with modern physics is that quantum mechanics gives only the probability of an experimental result. Neither the decay of an atomic nucleus nor the fact that it decays at one moment and not another can be properly pictured within the theory. It can only enable you to predict statistically the results of various experiments.
Physics has changed from its earlier form, when it tried to explain things and give some physical picture. Now the essence is regarded as mathematical. It's felt the truth is in the formulas. Now they may find an algorithm by which they hope to explain a wider range of experimental results, but it will still have inconsistencies. They hope that they can eventually explain all the results that could be gotten, but that is only a hope. (David Bohm, Problems with Modern Physics, Interview conducted by F. David Peat and John Briggs, published in Omni, January 1987)
In the Fifties, I sent my book (Quantum Theory) around to various quantum physicists - including Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, and Wolfgang Pauli. Bohr didn't answer, but Pauli liked it. Albert Einstein sent me a message that he'd like to talk with me. When we met he said the book had done about as well as you could do with quantum mechanics. But he was still not convinced it was a satisfactory theory.
Einstein's objection was not merely that it was statistical. He felt it was a kind of abstraction; quantum mechanics got correct results but left out much that would have made it intelligible. I came up with the causal interpretation (that the electron is a particle, but it also has a field around it. The particle is never separated from that field, and the field affects the movement of the particle in certain ways). Einstein didn't like it, though, because the interpretation had this notion of action at a distance: Things that are far away from each other profoundly affect each other. He believed only in local action.
I didn't come back to this implicate order until the Sixties, when I got interested in notions of order. I realized then the problem is that coordinates are still the basic order in physics, whereas everything else has changed. (David Bohm, On Quantum Theory, Interview, 1987)
The most radical change in the notion of order since Isaac Newton came with quantum mechanics. The quantum-mechanical idea of order contradicts coordinate order because Heisenberg's uncertainty principle made a detailed ordering of space and time impossible. When you apply quantum theory to general relativity, at very short distances like ten to the minus thirty-three centimeters, the notion of the order of space and time breaks down. (David Bohm, On Quantum Mechanics, 1987)
Physics is more like quantum organism than quantum mechanics. I think physicists have a tremendous reluctance to admit this. There is a long history of belief in quantum mechanics, and people have faith in it. And they don't like having this faith challenged. (David Bohm, On Quantum Physics, 1987)
Classical physics says that reality is actually little particles that separate the world into its independent elements. Now I'm proposing the reverse, that the fundamental reality is the enfoldment and unfoldment, and these particles are abstractions from that. We could picture the electron not as a particle that exists continuously but as something coming in and going out and then coming in again. If these various condensations are close together, they approximate a track. The electron itself can never be separated from the whole of space, which is its ground. (David Bohm, On Quantum Physics, 1987)
It seems that people are ready to wait twenty years for results if you've got formulas. If there are no formulas, they don't want to consider it. Formulas are means of talking utter nonsense until you understand what they mean. Every page of formulas usually contains six or seven arbitrary assumptions that take weeks of hard study to penetrate.
Younger physicists usually appreciate the implicate order because it makes quantum mechanics easier to grasp. By the time they're through graduate school, they've become dubious about it because they've heard that hidden variables are of no use because they've been refuted. Of course, nobody has really refuted them. At this point, I think that the major issue is mathematics. In supersymmetry theory an interesting piece of mathematics will attract attention, even without any experimental confirmation. (David Bohm, On Mathematics & Modern Physics, 1987)
David Bohm's Error: Bohm Quotes on no Absolute Truth / Truth is Evolving, an Approximation
The quotes below from David Bohm reflect a very similar opinion of Thomas Kuhn. Thomas Kuhn was correct when wrote his famous book, 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' in 1962 that the principles of reality were not known and thus this incomplete knowledge always left problems and ambiguity. His error (along with David Bohm and many other postmodern thinkers) is to then assume (without evidence) that this absolute knowledge of reality can never be found and that there will always be puzzles. David Bohm is further influenced by the ancient Eastern philosophers who did not believe reality / Brahman could be known and explained by language;
In the prevailing philosophy of the Orient, the immeasurable (i.e. that which cannot be named, described, or understood through any form of reason) is regarded as the primary reality. (David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980)
If we supposed that theories gave true knowledge, corresponding to 'reality as it is', then we would have to conclude that Newtonian Mechanics was true until around 1900, after which it suddenly became false, while relativity and quantum theory suddenly became the truth. Such an absurd conclusion does not arise, however, if we say that all theories are insights, which are neither true nor false.
... Man is continually developing new forms of insight, which are clear up to a point and then tend to become unclear. In this activity, there is evidently no reason to suppose that there is or will be a final form of insight (corresponding to absolute truth) or even a steady series of approximations to this. Rather, one may expect the unending development of new forms of insight (which will, however assimilate certain key features of the older forms as simplifications, in the way that relativity theory does with Newtonian theory). Our theories are to be regarded primarily as ways of looking at the world as a whole ('world-views') rather than as 'absolute true knowledge of how things are'. (David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980)
What prevents theoretical insights from going beyond existing limitations and changing to meet new facts is just the belief that theories give true knowledge of reality (which implies, of course, that they never change). Although our modern way of thinking has changed a great deal relative to the ancient one, the two have had one key feature in common: i.e. they are both generally 'blinkered' by the notion that theories give true knowledge about 'reality as it is'. Thus, both are led to confuse the forms and shapes induced in our perceptions by theoretical insight with a reality independent of our thought and way of looking. This confusion is of crucial significance, since it leads us to approach nature, society and the individual in terms of more or less fixed and limited forms of thought, and thus, apparently, to keep on confirming the limitations of these forms of thought in experience. (David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980)
Dynamic Unity of Reality: 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order' (1980)
If man 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 a border then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole. (David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980)
When I was a boy a certain prayer we said every day in Hebrew contained the words to love God with all your heart all your soul, and all your mind. My understanding of these words, that is, this notion of wholeness - not necessarily directed toward God but as a way of living - had a tremendous impact on me. I also felt a sense of nature being whole very early. I felt internally related to trees, mountains, and stars in a way I wasn't to all the chaos of the cities.
When I first studied quantum mechanics I felt again that sense of internal relationship - that it was describing something that I was experiencing directly rather than just thinking about. The notion of spin particularly fascinated me: the idea that when something is spinning in a certain direction, it could also spin in the other direction but that somehow the two directions together would be a spin in a third direction. I felt that somehow that described experience with the processes of the mind. In thinking about spin I felt I was in a direct relationship to nature. In quantum mechanics I came closer to my intuitive sense of nature. (David Bohm, Interview conducted by F. David Peat and John Briggs, published in Omni, January 1987)
The notion that all these fragments is separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion. Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today. Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has brought about pollution, destruction of the balance of nature, over-population, world-wide economic and political disorder and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who live in it. Individually there has developed a widespread feeling of helplessness and despair, in the face of what seems to be an overwhelming mass of disparate social forces, going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it. (David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980)
.. 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 as 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. (David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980)
Indeed, man has always been seeking wholeness - mental, physical, social and individual. (David Bohm, 1980)
David Bohm Biography: Life & Ideas
David Joseph Bohm (December 20, 1917 - October 27, 1992) was an American quantum physicist / philosopher of science.
Born at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Bohm attended Pennsylvania State College, graduating in 1939 and then heading west to work with theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer, first at the California Institute of Technology for a year, and then at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with a few of Oppenheimer's other graduate students, Bohm became increasingly involved not only with physics, but with radical politics. Like many young idealists in the late 1930s (including Oppenheimer himself), Bohm and his colleagues gravitated to alternative models of society, and became active in organizations like the Young Communist League, the Campus Committee to Fight Conscription, and the Committee for Peace Mobilization (all of which the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover would brand as Communist fronts).
During World War II, the Manhattan Project mobilized much of Berkeley's physics research in the effort to produce the first atomic bomb. Though Oppenheimer had asked Bohm to work with him at Los Alamos, the top-secret laboratory established in 1942 to design the weapon, the head of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves, would not approve his security clearance, after tip-offs about Bohm's politics (Bohm's friend, Joseph Weinberg, had also come under suspicion for espionage). Bohm remained in Berkeley, teaching physics, before completing his Ph.D. in 1943, under an unusually ironic circumstance.
According to Peat, 'the scattering calculations [of collisions of protons and deuterons] that he had completed proved useful to the Manhattan Project and were immediately classified. Without security clearance, Bohm was denied access to his own work; not only would he be barred from defending his thesis, he was not even allowed to write his own thesis in the first place! To satisfy the university, Oppenheimer certified that Bohm had successfully completed the research.'
He would later, however, work on the theoretical calculations for the Calutrons at the Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, used to electromagnetically enrich uranium for use in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
After the war David Bohm became an assistant professor at Princeton University, where he worked closely with Albert Einstein. In May 1949, at the beginning of the McCarthyism hysteria period, the House Un-American Activities Committee called upon Bohm to testify before it - because of his previous ties to suspected Communists. But Bohm pleaded the Fifth amendment right to decline to testify, and refused to give evidence against his colleagues. In 1950 Bohm was charged for refusing to answer questions before the Committee and arrested. He was acquitted in May 1951 but Princeton had already suspended him, and after his acquittal refused to renew his contract. Bohm's colleagues sought to have his position at Princeton re-instated, and Einstein reportedly wanted Bohm to serve as his assistant, but the university did not renew the contract. Bohm then left for Brazil to take up a Chair in Physics at the University of São Paulo.
In 1955, he moved to Israel where he spent two years at the Technion at Haifa. Here he met his wife Saral, who became an important figure in the development of his ideas. In 1957 Bohm moved to the UK. He held a research fellowship at University of Bristol until 1961, when he became Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College of the University of London, post he held until his retirement in 1987.
David Bohm made a number of significant contributions to physics, particularly in the area of quantum mechanics and relativity theory. While still a post-graduate at Berkeley he discovered the electron phenomenon now known as Bohm-diffusion. His first book, Quantum Theory published in 1951, was well-received by Einstein among others. However, Bohm became unsatisfied with the orthodox approach to quantum theory which he had written about in that book and began to develop his own approach (Bohm interpretation), a non-local hidden variable deterministic theory whose predictions agree perfectly with the quantum, indeterministic, ones. His work and the EPR argument became the major factor motivating John Bell's inequality, whose consequences are still being investigated.
In 1959, with his student Yakir Aharonov, he discovered the Aharonov-Bohm effect, showing how a electro-magnetic field could affect a region of space in which the field had been shielded, although its vector potential did exist there. This showed for the first time that the vector potential, hitherto a mathematical convenience, could have real physical (quantum) effects.
Bohm's scientific and philosophical views were inseparable. In 1959 he came across a book by the Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti. It struck him how his own ideas on quantum mechanics meshed with the philosophical ideas of Krishnamurti. Bohm's approach to philosophy and physics receive expression in his 1980 book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, and in the book Science, Order and Creativity. In his later years, he developed the technique that has become known as "Bohm Dialogue", in which equal status and "free space" form the most important prerequisites. He believed that if carried out on a sufficiently wide scale, such Dialogues could help overcome fragmentation in society.
David Bohm died of a heart attack in London on October 27, 1992.
David Bohm Biography: Life and Ideas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm
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