David Bohm and the Implicate Order

Snip: "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."  David Bohm and the Implicate Order
By David Pratt

The death of David Bohm on 27 October 1992 is a great loss not only forthe physics community but for all those interested in the philosophicalimplications of modern science. David Bohm was one of the mostdistinguished theoretical physicists of his generation, and a fearlesschallenger of scientific orthodoxy. His interests and influenceextended far beyond physics and embraced biology, psychology,philosophy, religion, art, and the future of society. Underlying hisinnovative approach to many different issues was the fundamental ideathat beyond the visible, tangible world there lies a deeper, implicateorder of undivided wholeness.

David Bohm was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1917. He becameinterested in science at an early age, and as a young boy invented adripless teapot, and his father, a successful businessman, urged him totry to make a profit on the idea. But after learning that the firststep was to conduct a door-to-door survey to test market demand, hisinterest in business waned and he decided to become a theoreticalphysicist instead.

In the 1930s he attended Pennsylvania State College where he becamedeeply interested in quantum physics, the physics of the subatomicrealm. After graduating, he attended the University of California,Berkeley. While there he worked at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratorywhere, after receiving his doctorate in 1943, he began what was tobecome his landmark work on plasmas (a plasma is a gas containing ahigh density of electrons and positive ions). Bohm was surprised tofind that once electrons were in a plasma, they stopped behaving likeindividuals and started behaving as if they were part of a larger andinterconnected whole. He later remarked that he frequently had theimpression that the sea of electrons was in some sense alive.

In 1947 Bohm took up the post of assistant professor at PrincetonUniversity, where he extended his research to the study of electrons inmetals. Once again the seemingly haphazard movements of individualelectrons managed to produce highly organized overall effects. Bohm'sinnovative work in this area established his reputation as atheoretical physicist.

In 1951 Bohm wrote a classic textbook entitled Quantum Theory, in whichhe presented a clear account of the orthodox, Copenhagen interpretationof quantum physics. The Copenhagen interpretation was formulated mainlyby Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the 1920s and is still highlyinfluential today. But even before the book was published, Bohm beganto have doubts about the assumptions underlying the conventionalapproach. He had difficulty accepting that subatomic particles had noobjective existence and took on definite properties only whenphysicists tried to observe and measure them. He also had difficultybelieving that the quantum world was characterized by absoluteindeterminism and chance, and that things just happened for no reasonwhatsoever. He began to suspect that there might be deeper causesbehind the apparently random and crazy nature of the subatomic world.

Bohm sent copies of his textbook to Bohr and Einstein. Bohr did notrespond, but Einstein phoned him to say that he wanted to discuss itwith him. In the first of what was to turn into a six-month series ofspirited conversations, Einstein enthusiastically told Bohm that he hadnever seen quantum theory presented so clearly, and admitted that hewas just as dissatisfied with the orthodox approach as Bohm was. Theyboth admired quantum theory's ability to predict phenomena, but couldnot accept that it was complete and that it was impossible to arrive atany clearer understanding of what was going on in the quantum realm.

It was while writing Quantum Theory that Bohm came into conflict withMcCarthyism. He was called upon to appear before the Un-AmericanActivities Committee in order to testify against colleagues andassociates. Ever a man of principle, he refused. The result was thatwhen his contract at Princeton expired, he was unable to obtain a jobin the USA. He moved first to Brazil, then to Israel, and finally toBritain in 1957, where he worked first at Bristol University and lateras Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College, University ofLondon, until his retirement in 1987. Bohm will be remembered above allfor two radical scientific theories: the causal interpretation ofquantum physics, and the theory of the implicate order and undividedwholeness.

In 1952, the year after his discussions with Einstein, Bohm publishedtwo papers sketching what later came to be called the causalinterpretation of quantum theory which, he said, "opens the door forthe creative operation of underlying, and yet subtler, levels ofreality." (David Bohm and F. David Peat, Science, Order &Creativity, Bantam Books, New York, 1987, p. 88.) He continued toelaborate and refine his ideas until the end of his life. In his view,subatomic particles such as electrons are not simple, structurelessparticles, but highly complex, dynamic entities. He rejects the viewthat their motion is fundamentally uncertain or ambiguous; they followa precise path, but one which is determined not only by conventionalphysical forces but also by a more subtle force which he calls thequantum potential. The quantum potential guides the motion of particlesby providing "active information" about the whole environment. Bohmgives the analogy of a ship being guided by radar signals: the radarcarries information from all around and guides the ship by giving formto the movement produced by the much greater but unformed power of itsengines.

The quantum potential pervades all space and provides directconnections between quantum systems. In 1959 Bohm and a young researchstudent Yakir Aharonov discovered an important example of quantuminterconnectedness. They found that in certain circumstances electronsare able to "feel" the presence of a nearby magnetic field even thoughthey are traveling in regions of space where the field strength iszero. This phenomenon is now known as the Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect,and when the discovery was first announced many physicists reacted withdisbelief. Even today, despite confirmation of the effect in numerousexperiments, papers still occasionally appear arguing that it does notexist.

In 1982 a remarkable experiment to test quantum interconnectedness wasperformed by a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect in Paris.The original idea was contained in a thought experiment (also known asthe "EPR paradox") proposed in 1935 by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky,and Nathan Rosen, but much of the later theoretical groundwork was laidby David Bohm and one of his enthusiastic supporters, John Bell ofCERN, the physics research center near Geneva. The results of theexperiment clearly showed that subatomic particles that are far apartare able to communicate in ways that cannot be explained by thetransfer of physical signals traveling at or slower than the speed oflight. Many physicists, including Bohm, regard these "nonlocal"connections as absolutely instantaneous. An alternative view is thatthey involve subtler, nonphysical energies traveling faster than light,but this view has few adherents since most physicists still believethat nothing-can exceed the speed of light.

The causal interpretation of quantum theory initially met withindifference or hostility from other physicists, who did not takekindly to Bohm's powerful challenge to the common consensus. In recentyears, however, the theory has been gaining increasing"respectability." Bohm's approach is capable of being developed indifferent directions. For instance, a number of physicists, includingJean-Paul Vigier and several other physicists at the Institut HenriPoincaré in France, explain the quantum potential in terms offluctuations in an underlying ether.

In the 1960s Bohm began to take a closer look at the notion of order.One day he saw a device on a television program that immediately firedhis imagination. It consisted of two concentric glass cylinders, thespace between them being filled with glycerin, a highly viscous fluid.If a droplet of ink is placed in the fluid and the outer cylinder isturned, the droplet is drawn out into a thread that eventually becomesso thin that it disappears from view; the ink particles are enfoldedinto the glycerin. But if the cylinder is then turned in the oppositedirection, the thread-form reappears and rebecomes a droplet; thedroplet is unfolded again. Bohm realized that when the ink was diffusedthrough the glycerin it was not a state of "disorder" but possessed ahidden, or nonmanifest, order.

In Bohm's view, all the separate objects, entities, structures, andevents in the visible or explicate world around us are relativelyautonomous, stable, and temporary "subtotalities" derived from adeeper, implicate order of unbroken wholeness. Bohm gives the analogyof a flowing stream:

On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices,ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independentexistence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowingmovement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow. Suchtransitory subsistence as may be possessed by these abstracted formsimplies only a relative independence or autonomy of behaviour, ratherthan absolutely independent existence as ultimate substances.
(David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, Boston, 1980, p. 48.)
We must learn to view everything as part of "Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement." (Ibid., p. 11.)

Another metaphor Bohm uses to illustrate the implicate order is that ofthe 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 whereit interferes with the second beam. The complex swirls of theinterference pattern recorded on the photographic plate appearmeaningless and disordered to the naked eye. But like the ink dropdispersed in the glycerin, the pattern possesses a hidden or enfoldedorder, for when illuminated with laser light it produces athree-dimensional image of the original object, which can be viewedfrom any angle. A remarkable feature of a hologram is that if aholographic film is cut into pieces, each piece produces an image ofthe whole object, though the smaller the piece the hazier the image.Clearly the form and structure of the entire object are encoded withineach region of the photographic record.

Bohm suggests that the whole universe can be thought of as a kind ofgiant, flowing hologram, or holomovement, in which a total order iscontained, in some implicit sense, in each region of space and time.The explicate order is a projection from higher dimensional levels ofreality, and the apparent stability and solidity of the objects andentities composing it are generated and sustained by a ceaselessprocess of enfoldment and unfoldment, for subatomic particles areconstantly dissolving into the implicate order and thenrecrystallizing.

The quantum potential postulated in the causal interpretationcorresponds to the implicate order. But Bohm suggests that the quantumpotential is itself organized and guided by a superquantum potential,representing a second implicate order, or superimplicate order. Indeedhe proposes that there may be an infinite series, and perhapshierarchies, of implicate (or "generative") orders, some of which formrelatively closed loops and some of which do not. Higher implicateorders organize the lower ones, which in turn influence the higher.

Bohm believes that life and consciousness are enfolded deep in thegenerative order and are therefore present in varying degrees ofunfoldment in all matter, including supposedly "inanimate" matter suchas electrons or plasmas. He suggests that there is a"protointelligence" in matter, so that new evolutionary developments donot emerge in a random fashion but creatively as relatively integratedwholes from implicate levels of reality. The mystical connotations ofBohm's ideas are underlined by his remark that the implicate domain"could equally well be called Idealism, Spirit, Consciousness. Theseparation of the two -- matter and spirit -- is an abstraction. Theground is always one." (Quoted in Michael Talbot, The HolographicUniverse, HarperCollins, New York, 1991, p. 271.)

As with all truly great thinkers, David Bohm's philosophical ideasfound expression in his character and way of life. His students andcolleagues describe him as totally unselfish and non-competitive,always ready to share his latest thoughts with others, always open tofresh ideas, and single-mindedly devoted to a calm but passionatesearch into the nature of reality. In the words of one of his formerstudents, "He can only be characterized as a secular saint." (B. Hiley& F. David Peat eds., Quantum Implications: Essays in Honour ofDavid Bohm, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1987, p. 48.)

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

(Reprinted from Sunrise magazine, February/March 1993. Copyright © 1993 by Theosophical University Press)

SOURCE: Theosophy Northwest