Böhm, David (1917–1992)

The American theoretical physicist David Böhm is widely regarded as one of the 20th century's most original thinkers. Over the course of a distinguished career that spanned more than 50 years of teaching and writing, Böhm participated vigorously in the international scientific debates surrounding the overthrow of classical physics by the twin but apparently irreconcilable theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Along the way he made important contributions to the study of the basic properties of the physical world, such as the theory of the plasma, a fourth state of matter in addition to the solid, liquid, and gaseous states. Eventually the reach of Bohm's ideas went beyond the traditional boundaries of physics and cosmology and came to influence the fields of philosophy, language studies, psychology, and the arts. In [Page 102]his later years he became convinced that the phenomenal world, including time and space, is no more than the surface appearance of something much deeper, the ultimate ground of being in which even the distinction between mind and matter could be resolved. As Böhm observed, not only had Einstein's theory of relativity shown that a sharp distinction between space and time cannot be maintained, but also quantum theory implies that elements separated in space and moments separated in time are noncausally related projections of a higher-dimensional reality, a reality that is, moreover, enfolded in consciousness. The universe, according to Böhm, is an unbroken, flowing, unified whole.

Born in the coal-mining town of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where his father owned a small furniture store, David Böhm later recalled his first encounter, at age 10, with a science fiction magazine, which fired his imagination with tales of space travel and distant planets. An absorbing interest in science led to his serious study of physics as an undergraduate at Pennsylvania State University. Following a year of graduate study at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Böhm arranged to meet with J. Robert Oppenheimer, founder of a school of theoretical physics at the University of California, Berkeley, that was attracting many of the brightest young scholars in the nation. Evidently impressed, Oppenheimer invited Böhm to join his team of research students, and in 1941 Böhm moved to Berkeley and entered the vanguard of nuclear physics, where his creativity began to flourish. Against the background of World War II, however, the implications of basic research into the nature of the atom had taken an ominous turn. By the end of the 1930s scientists in both Europe and the United States had recognized the possibility of constructing a nuclear weapon, and in 1942 the U.S. government secretly enlisted Oppenheimer to head an international group of top physicists in developing an atomic bomb. The code name for their efforts was the Manhattan Project, and the extreme concern with security surrounding their work was to have a profound effect on the future of many of the scientists affiliated with the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley.

Although Böhm was not directly involved with the Manhattan Project and in fact was ignorant of its very existence, his sympathy with socialism and his association with members of the American Communist Party placed him, and other scientists who held similar views, under a cloud of suspicion; Oppenheimer himself was under close surveillance. The fear that the Soviet Union, then a U.S. ally in the war against Germany, would succeed in developing a nuclear weapon before the United States generated an atmosphere of mistrust that lasted long after American warplanes had dropped atom bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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