The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot Read Free Book Online Page B

philosophical sensibilities. Over the course of
their meetings they discussed many other things, but these points in particular
gained new prominence in Bohm's thoughts. Inspired by his interactions with
Einstein, he accepted the validity of his misgivings about quantum physics and
decided there .had to be an alternative view. When his textbook Quantum
Theory was published in 1951 it was hailed as a classic, but it was a
classic about a subject to which Bohm no longer gave his full allegiance. His
mind, ever active and always looking for deeper explanations, was already
searching for a better way of describing reality.
    A New Kind of
Field and the Bullet That Killed Lincoln
    After his talks with
Einstein, Bohm tried to find a workable alternative to Bohr's interpretation.
He began by assuming that particles such as electrons do exist in the
absence of observers. He also assumed that there was a deeper reality beneath
Bohr's inviolable wall, a subquantum level that still awaited discovery by
science. Building on these premises he discovered that simply by proposing the
existence of a new kind of field on this subquantum level he was able to
explain the findings of quantum physics as well as Bohr could. Bohm called his
proposed new field the quantum potential and theorized that, like
gravity, it pervaded all of space. However, unlike gravitational fields, magnetic
fields, and so on, its influence did not diminish with distance. Its effects
were subtle, but it was equally powerful everywhere. Bohm published his
alternative interpretation of quantum theory in 1952.
    Reaction to his new
approach was mainly negative. Some physicists were so convinced such
alternatives were impossible that they dismissed his ideas out of hand. Others
launched passionate attacks against his reasoning. In the end virtually all
such arguments were based primarily on philosophical differences, but it did
not matter. Bohr's point of view had become so entrenched in physics that
Bohm's alternative was looked upon as little more than heresy.
    Despite the harshness of
these attacks Bohm remained unswerving in his conviction that there was more to
reality than Bohr's view allowed. He also felt that science was much too
limited in its outlook when it came to assessing new ideas such as his own, and
in a 1957 book entitled Causality and Chance in Modern Physics , he
examined several of the philosophical suppositions responsible for this
attitude. One was the widely held assumption that it was possible for any
single theory, such as quantum theory, to be complete. Bohm criticized
this assumption by pointing out that nature may be infinite. Because it would
not be possible for any theory to completely explain something that is
infinite, Bohm suggested that open scientific inquiry might be better served if
researchers refrained from making this assumption.
    In the book he argued
that the way science viewed causality was also much too limited. Most effects
were thought of as having only one or several causes. However, Bohm felt that
an effect could have an infinite number of causes. For example, if you asked
someone what caused Abraham Lincoln's death, they might answer that it was the
bullet in John Wilkes Booth's gun. But a complete list of all the causes that
contributed to Lincoln's death would have to include all of the events that led
to the development of the gun, all of the factors that caused Booth to want to
kill Lincoln, all of the steps in the evolution of the human race that allowed
for the development of a hand capable of holding a gun, and so on, and so on.
Bohm conceded that most of the time one could ignore the vast cascade of causes
that had led to any given effect, but he still felt it was important for
scientists to remember that no single cause-and-effect relationship was ever
really separate from the universe as a whole.
    If You Want to
Know Where You Are, Ask the Nonlocals
    During this same period
of his life Bohm also continued to refine his