David Bohm

David Bohm was an American-born theoretical physicist who studied at Berkeley and taught at Princeton before leaving the United States in the McCarthy era; he later worked in Brazil, Israel and Britain, finally at Birkbeck College, London. In 1952 he set out the pilot-wave or 'hidden variables' interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which particles have definite positions guided by a real wave and determinism is preserved. He later wrote on wholeness and the implicate order.

Key ideas

• Quantum mechanics can be given a deterministic interpretation with particles that always have definite positions.
• The wave function is real and guides the motion of particles.
• Such a theory must be non-local.
• Reality is an unbroken wholeness, with an 'implicate order' underlying the explicit one.

Major works

• Quantum Theory (1951)
• "A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of 'Hidden' Variables" (1952)
• Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980)
• The Undivided Universe (1993, with Basil Hiley)

In the conversation

• Question What did Bell’s theorem actually prove? I keep hearing three different answers Ethan Mercer · 4 replies
• Debate Many-worlds is the most conservative reading of quantum mechanics, not the wildest Pieter van Dijkhuizen · 5 replies
• Discussion Kalam atomism did not anticipate quantum theory, however tempting the comparison Abdulrahman Al-Bassam · 4 replies