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>> Unhappy in Brazil, Bohm traveled to Israel,
where he accepted a positionat the Technion in Haifa.
While in Israel, Bohm also met and married
the woman who was to become his lifelong partner, Sarah
Woolfson.
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>> David had been exiled to Brazil after the House
Un-American Activities business.
And he was never happy there.
There were many problems, he felt.
And then he was offeredan opportunity in Israel.
And of course, it was a new state at the time.
And also, of course, he was Jewish.
Maybe he saw this as a good opportunity.
And he'd only been there a couple of weeks
when he was invited to a party.
And Saral was present.
And she spotted him from across the room
and immediately was interested in this young man.
I would describe Saral as a very motherly person.
She wanted to look after people.
She liked to feed people.
She was very sociable and including everyone.
>> My wife and I used togo to the public library.
And she discovered a book by Krishnamurti.
And she read in there the words of the observer
and the observed.
And I had been interested in that because, in quantum
mechanics, that is a key question, in the sense that,
because of this undivided wholeness,
the two cannot be separated.
>> And she opened the book,and in it immediately saw
references to things withregard to the observer
and the observed.
And she was startled because that's what David
was working with in physics.
And Saral is trying to understand how could this
be that this Indian philosopher is also
talking about the observer and the observed.
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>> From Israel, Bohm moved to Bristol.
And it was here that his fundamental ideas
on the nature of reality began to take fresh impetus.
In Bristol, Bohm left hishidden variable ideas behind,
and was now focusing on the factthat, despite decades of work,
physicists had been unableto reconcile quantum theory
with Einstein's relativity.
>> He's left behind his hidden variables.
He's left that behind, and now he's
asking, why has there been decades of work
on relativity and quantum theory,
the two key theories ofphysics, why are there two?
Why is it not just one theory,one unified theory, as Einstein
had hoped there would be?
And so he's wondering, do we need a new theory?
Is that the core issue?
Or is a completely new order to physics, a new approach?
And that was what he began to think about, what
he called the implicate order.
We need a radically new order.
So that was where his thinking was when he arrived in Britain.
>> At this time, Bohm also developed a new interest that
was to have a deep impact on his life and his approach
to science.
As we have seen, quantum physics has long
been concerned with the process of wave function observation.
And Bohm was very much aware that, depending
on the conditions of an experiment,
that electrons would behave differently depending
on what was being observed.
>> When I was younger, I felt that, in the beginning,
that science would surely be a source of benefiting mankind.
And I had no question about it.
I began to feel that something beyond science
would be needed to approach this question,
you see, that science alone could not
guarantee that it would be used for benefiting mankind,
the scientific impulse.
In the beginning, I thought it would, just truth alone.
Then I began to look intophilosophy, Eastern and Western
and so on, and some peoplewith religious ideas.
I mean, just simply looking at it when I was in Bristol,
in England.
>> In quantum physics, in the study of the behavior
of the electron, you had this very mysterious property that
your act of observing the electron changes it in such
a way that there's a link between the apparatus
of observation and what is observed.
And Krishnamurti made a similar statement about events
in the psychological field, which
is that the act of observing something
inwardly, some emotion or some attitude or whatever,
the very seeing of it changes it,
so that the inward sense of an observer, myself, who's looking
is inextricably connected with whatever I'm looking at.
And so Krishnamurti expressed that
in sort of an aphoristic fashion,
by saying the observer is the observed.
>> Which, in essence, took the questions that David was
working with in physics and flipped them into the human
realm--
the realm of human experience, human life, human difficulties.
David felt that Krishnamurti was on to something
of great importance that could help
to complete the sense of wholeness
that he was trying to bring to light with his work in physics.
>> Krishnamurti's approachaligned with Bohm's own views
on the nature of thought, of reality,
and on the nature ofconsciousness, in particular,
seen as a coherent whole whichis never static or complete,
but a continuous processof enfolding and unfolding.
Both Bohm and Krishnamurti questioned
their respective backgrounds, ultimately rejecting
the orthodoxy they had once felt would provide answers
to humanity's big questions.
>> In his early life, he was kind of adopted by this
organization called the Theosophical Society,
which discovered him when he was a 14-year-old boy on the beach
in South India.
And they predicted that he was going
to become this great what they called world teacher,
and bring a new kind of consciousness to mankind.
And they cultivated him and nourished him in this role.
But somewhere about the age of 25, 27, maybe a little
bit earlier than that, he began to seriously question
all of this, and find it very limiting,
similarly to the way Bohm had found the scientific orthodoxy
to be limiting.
>> So Bohm wanted to meet this man.
And they had this meeting, and I'm told partway
through it Krishnamurti was supposed to have stood up
with pleasure or enthusiasm or whatever,
and said you have seen it, sir, so that Bohm had seen it.
And then Bohm began to have more meetings with Krishnamurti.
He became a trustee of Krishnamurti's school
at Brockwood Park.
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>> It was at Brockwood Park that Bohm and Krishnamurti entered
into a series of conversations whose themes covered the ending
of time, the nature of mind, cosmic order,
and much more over a 25-year period.
>> And from Krishnamurti's perspective,
it was very important for him because he felt as though he
had a tremendous reservoir of insights to share with
the world, but he felt like he couldn't necessarily bring it
out by himself.
He needed people to ask him.
He needed people to dig and to question him.
And of all the people he evermet, Bohm was the best at that.
And I think Bohm, to some extent,
formed a similar function for Krishnamurti,
because Krishnamurti could raise questions with him that might
not occur in another context.
>> Grief is not my grief.
Grief is human.
>> Yes, now but how are to people to see that?
Because a person feeling grief feels
that it's his grief, you--
[chuckles] I mean, doesn't that seem right?
>> Yes, sir.
I think it is because partly of our education,
partly our society, tradition.
>> But it's also implicit in our whole way of thinking.
>> Yeah.
Oh, [inaudible].
Quite right.
So--
>> And we have to jump out of that.
>> Yes.
>> But perhaps we can see that love is not personal.
Love does not belong to anybody, any more
than any other quality does.
>> Earth is not English Earth or French Earth.
Earth is Earth.
>> You see?
And I was thinking of an example in physics
that, if a scientist or chemist is studying
an element such as sodium, it's not that he studies his sodium,
and somebody else studies his sodium,
and they somehow compare notes.
>> Quite, quite, quite.
Sodium is sodium.
>> Sodium is sodium universally.
>> Yes.
>> And if we have to say love is love universally, right?
Essentially, the point made by Krishnamurti
was that the problems of mankind originate
in thought itself, in consciousness itself, you see?
And as previous to that, I had grown up
believing that poverty was the main problem of mankind,
and science would help me eliminate that.
And I could see that no matter how far science went,
it probably wouldn't.
And even if it did, it wouldn't really
solve-- it wouldn't really make mankind happy.
>> I remember I once asked Bohm, I said, well,
what do you think, what's the main contribution
of Krishnamurti?
And if I remember it correctly, Bohm
said something like that Krishnamurti kind of pointed
out that thought is an actual movement in our lives.
It's a physical movement, physiological movement.
And it has a tremendous power.
It's behind almost all our problems.
>> And we have to give attention to that manner in which thought
is participating and shaping what we observe in order
to understand how our whole mind is working,
especially with respect to conflicts which occur between
you and me, between my country and another country,
and also the conflicts which occur inwardly.
>> And there, then, of course,Krishnamurti was suggesting
that, if you are able to be quiet,
the deeper layers of realitymight open up for you.
>> So in that state of mind, the mind is not just blank.
You know, I'm not doing anything.
It's very active.
The thinking process doesn't have
to do with thought or recognition or knowledge,
but it's in a state of just perception, awareness,
attention.
Maybe you could even say receptivity to truth.
>> There might have been many reasons Bohm was drawn
to Krishnamurti.
The ones that are apparent to me,
Bohm perceived the wholeness of life.
He perceived life as one indivisible whole,
including nature, including consciousness.
And in Krishnamurti, he found someone
who also had this notion.
>> Krishnamurti, who was actually addressing
the separation of the observerand the observed in the same
way as the wholeness inquantum theory was saying,
you can't make a separation between the system that
you're looking at and the apparatus,
which was the oldtraditional way of doing it,
that somehow these things formed a whole.
But rather than saying you can't develop concepts
for it, what David was trying to do was to develop concepts.
Now, to develop those concepts you
can't develop within the scientific context.
You've got to go outside to a wider set of concepts.
And he found in Krishnamurti a way
of discussing this more general question.
>> I remember one day we were here in Italy,
and he said to me, do you thinkI should give up doing physics
and just devote myself to Krishnamurti?
And my reply was kind of, fish exist
outside the goldfish bowl.
But that was it.
He was that extreme, that maybe he
should devote himself completely to having
his own brain transformed.
>> Having settled permanently in the UK,
it was while at Birkbeck College in London that Bohm formed one
of the most enduring science partnerships of his life with
physicist Basil Hiley.
And he also had an unexpectedand welcome encounter
with a forgotten theory.
And that encounter changed everything.
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>> At that time, David Bohm wasdeveloping a new idea which was
called structured process, thatbasically we want to start with
process.
Not particles moving in spacetime,
but a process from which both particles and spacetime
can emerge.
Very radical ideas.
Chris Dewdney and ChrisPhillipidis came up to me
and said, why don't youtalk about the '52 paper?
And that's when I said, mm, uh, mm,
uh, because I think it's wrong.
And that's when Chris said to me, Basil,
have you read the paper?
And I then had to agree that I hadn't.
>> It had been decades since the physics orthodoxy had
blackballed Bohm and his hidden variables.
It would take a new team of mavericks
to unearth this critical work and resurrect it
for a new generation.
>> Well, I got to know David Bohm quite well when I was
a lecturer at Birkbeck College.
We had many very interesting discussions,
and Bohm was somebody who I got a lot from.
I always thought that he wasvery much like a wave function
himself, that you'd ask a question,
you see, a very specific question.
And he would be very focused and give you a deep, very focused
answer to that question.
And then it would start to spread out,
and it would encompass a little more about physics,
and then it spread, and then about philology,
and about human nature, and so on.
And I'd get a bit lost about what's going on,
so I'd need another question.
I'd ask him another question, and then woomph.
The conversation would focus itself very deeply
on this particular point.
And he would give a very succinct answer to that,
and then again he would spread out like this.
So it's just the way a wave functions as you measure it,
it's the particle here.
And woomph, you see?
And then it spreads out again, like this.
>> They'd finally developed sufficient computing power
needed to run the complex mathematics required
to describe Bohm's hidden variables.
>> I think it'd be a veryvaluable thing if we could show
clearly how Bohm's '52 theoryworked in the two slits
experiment, because obviously,the two slits experiment is
the iconic experiment in theinterpretation of quantum
theory.
And so Basil went off and read the papers.
I set about calculating the particle trajectories for this.
And Chris Phillipidis produced the quantum potential picture.
>> And that's what Chris was an absolute master at, was
actually developing computer programs to actually simulate
this, and let's have a look at what is going on here.
>> When we put the two together, I mean,
we were initially I think quite staggered by how amazing this
story was, which had never been told in any sort of clear,
detailed way.
>> And there was a trajectory for the two slits experiment.
Wow.
>> You could actually see in the images that reproduced exactly
how you could have particle trajectories in the two slits
experiment and account for interference, something,
of course, which is forbidden in normal quantum theory.
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You could actually see how the thing worked exactly.
You could follow individual particles
as it was affected by this potential through space,
and consequentially would guide particles
into the bright interference fringes.
>> Wherever there was a dipin the quantum potential--
that's the rate of change of apotential, which is a force--
and the trajectories wouldjump across the ditch.
And when they were on the plateaus,
they would just come straight.
And the end result was a gathering
of these trajectories which explained completely
the interference pattern.
>> There was a physicist, Franco Selleri,
who was particularly supportive of this work once he'd learned
about it.
And he referred to these movies as the hard porn of physics,
in a sense, because they would be censored by the orthodoxy.
You shouldn't be able to see this stuff,
and yet here we were projecting it in front of them.
>> At that stage, when Dave was still alive,
he saw these trajectories and this quantum potential,
and his eyes actually lit up because he had not seen them.
He'd written about them, but he had not seen them.
And then we started discussing the quantum potential,
what could it mean.
And this quantum potential energy
only functions when quantum phenomena appear.
That is, in the particle approaching two slits,
it is the quantum potential that organizes
the way the individual trajectories work.
So there is a dynamic whole process
going on in which the quantum potential appears.
>> If you're looking at interpretations or ways
of looking at quantum mechanics,my view is that probably
the Bohm-Hiley way of looking atquantum mechanics has the most
satisfactory ontology.
So you have a picture of what constitutes reality
without changing quantum mechanics.
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>> The Bohmian theory made a clear prediction about
the nonlocality of the world.
What is nonlocality?
Nonlocality is really, to put it in simple words,
the profound discovery of the interconnectedness
of the universe at the fundamental level of quantum.
Now, that conflicts deeply right away with relativity theory,
where it says, no, the speed of light is limited.
Everything is local.
Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light,
so how could everything be instantaneously
interconnected in the universe?
And that's the big clash that we have today.
And that's why also Bohm's theory of hidden variables,
which are nonlocal, has really been rejected from the start.
>> It seems strange to us.
And I stress the word seems.
But if we want to make senseof a theory, that matters also.
And sometimes when a theory seems strange, we get past it.
And other times when it seems strange,
it's pointing us to something that we
haven't understood well enough.
>> It really says that there exists a hidden regime
of reality in which everything is interconnected,
but no person, even in the future,
will be able to access that domain and control it.
So this is also what the mystical traditions
tell us, that we must be humble in front of reality,
that there will always be domains of reality that
will remain beyond science, beyond the scientific method,
will remain beyond access by scientific agents.
And if the quantum potential is discovered in this way
and nonlocality is proven, then the existence of that domain
is proven.
>> Remember, we're talking about wholeness.
We have to have wholeness in here.
Here, we agree with Bohm.
Bohm pointed out that it was very important the new feature
that quantum mechanics introduces is a kind
of wholeness, which means we cannot analyze things
by cutting them up into little bits as we do in classical
physics.
But what we can do is, if we want to try and cut it up,
that the way one bit goes into the next bit
actually involves unfolding into the whole
and then enfolding back again into a particular region.
And so you get this idea of unfolding, enfolding,
unfolding, enfolding.
So what looks like a continuoustrajectory is actually a series
of foldings and unfoldings.
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>> I tried to get some idea ofwhat might be the process which
was implied by the mathematicsof the quantum theory.
And this process is what I call enfoldment,
that the mathematics itself suggests
a movement in which everything in which
any particular element of space may
have a field which unfolds into the whole,
and the whole enfolds into it.
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>> What David and I have done is to open up the discussion,
which I find, when I'm talking to young people,
that they're very interested in trying to proceed further with
these ideas.
In other words, some of them have actually
got it, as I put it.
They know in their basic feelings
that this is an interesting way to go.
>> The lab at University College London is at the center
of experiments to prove the existence of the quantum
potential.
>> If the quantum potential exists in this way,
then that really is the first evidence for the profound
interconnectedness of the physical universe at a very
deep, fundamental level.
That would revolutionize our scientific worldview.
It would validate those views of unification,
those views that speak to the wholism of the universe.
And it truly would be a confirmation
of a kind of wholism that religions and spiritual systems
and mystical systems have intuited for many centuries,
and millennia, even.
>> So what does all this mean for you, for me, the universe,
and everything?
Bohm suggests that, out of perceived emptiness, out
of the so-called vacuum state, particles interact with,
respond to, and are informed by an information potential which
allows the cosmos to emerge.
>> So it's the informationinforming action of the quantum
potential that makes it possiblefor the physical universe
to be.
>> Everything we know andeverything we will come to know
is already information waitingto unfold into manifest
reality.
It's the implicate waiting to become explicate.
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>> We aren't just things in space.
We are places of transformation.
And furthermore, our relationship with others,
but with all phenomena, is very much
a question of our relative positions.
And I think that was something else that really deeply
affected me about Bohm's work, the participant
nature of the observer in the emerging of what
we call reality.
The way that Quantum Cloud works is
that you are thedeterminer of what you see.
This is a mess of I think elements
that are both particlesand, hopefully, trajectories
that come together.
And depending on where yourposition is, either in a boat
or walking along the side of the Thames,
and depending on the time of day,
you will see or not seethe possibility of a body.
Quantum physics invites us to be participators in that emerging
of a world.
And it has very, very fundamental,
I think, both philosophical, spiritual,
and political implications, which are essentially
that each of us is a co-producer of a world, that each of us
is a co-producer of a possible future.
The work of people like Einstein and Bohm,
they are like huge windows opening in the imagination
to a way of dealing with life and the things
we encounter within it freshly and, in a sense,
with the right level of uncertainty.
>> The present ego identity is based, I think,
on a wrong mode of thought, you see,
in which a person identifies with his thoughts and with his
body and with things, you see, which means that he's creating
an illusion, that this self which people feel they have is
only a show.
It's not really there.
But it is such a convincing show that everybody
acts as if it were there, and that
gives it an apparent reality.
One of the most essential points of the scientific spirit
is to acknowledge the fact, or the interpretation of the fact,
whether you like it or not, that is not
to engage in wishful thinking or not to reject something
because you don't like it.
>> Is it possible scientifically to define this wholeness?
>> Well, not really.
Wholeness is an attitude or an approach, but it can be,
given a scientific realization, you see--
>> I think two levels, interdependency.
Firstly, external things, different nations,
different country, environment, and human beings,
other animals.
Everything interdependent.
So now, according to that reality,
we have to take care about the whole world and environment.
>> We are internally related to everything,
not externally related.
Consciousness is an internal relationship to the whole.
We take in the whole and we act toward the whole.
And that, in turn, whatever we have taken in
determines, basically, what we are.
>> When we pass through some sort of forest, no bird,
we feel something missing.
When we're passing through some birds singing,
some birds flying, then we feel more full.
So that's now the reality.
So interdependency on that level.
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>> Bohm's model of the implicateand explicate I think is
talking about how the subject/object split,
duality emerges from a ground,which Lao Tzu would call
the Dao, which is non-subject,non-object, but a unity,
a wholeness.
>> Ancient Indians only used mind or wisdom,
and sometimes meditation.
No instrument.
No modern science.
Use instrument.
>> Science is whatever people make of it.
You see, science has changed over the ages,
and it's different now from a few hundred years ago,
and it could be different again.
Now, there's no intrinsic reasonwhy science must necessarily
be measurement.
This is another historical development
which has come about over the past few centuries.
It's entirely contingent, and not absolutely necessary.
>> So far, we know this much.
Still limitless the reality we have to sort of investigate.
So David Bohm, I think, really something like open our mind.
So grateful.
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>> In all the areas that he worked in, he was constantly
pushing, pushing, pushing.
In physics, in dialogue, in consciousness.
>> He became a scientist, I believe,
in order to benefit humanity.
I think his mission was always leading up
to a transformation for human society,
overcoming the fragmentation that we experience
towards having the experience of a new interconnectedness
among us all to solve problems together,
overcoming the divisions.
So in that sense, he represented a truly holistic,
integrated vision of a human being.
And I think as that, he can serve as a model
for future generations.
>> It's a revolution.
It has radical implication about how we live our life,
how we interact with the Earth, how
we interact with each other.
And that revolution is unfinished.
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>> If we aspire to go beyond ourpresent state of consciousness,
if we truly want to be happier,to love and know ourselves
better, to regain meaning and wholeness,
the old disciplines onlyserve to deepen the illusion
of manifest reality.
We must look beyond the veil of form
to a realization of oneness present in you, in me,
the universe, and everything.
When you grasp, this it will put you
on the threshold of what is real and your place in reality.
Reality is wholeness, undivided wholeness.
And this fact has yet to dawn on billions of people.
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