David Bohm

David Bohm was not a charismatic man and he kept his circle of friends quite small and intimate. He had only a few close friends, including a few mentors and colleagues such as Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Yakir Aharonov and Jiddu Krishnamurti and Mort Weiss, whom he had met in his teen years and remained friends with throughout his life.

Bohm died of a heart attack on a taxi ride home in Hendon, on October 27, 1992.

David Joseph Baum was born on December 20, 1917 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He, and his younger brother Robert, were raised mainly by their father, Samuel Bohm, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant, who owned a furniture store. Bohm’s mother, Frieda (Popky) Bohm, was a Lithuanian-Jewish woman who suffered from mental instabilities.

As a boy, Bohm found it difficult to fit in with his peers. The struggles at home, his mother’s growing mental instability, and his father’s preoccupation with business all contributed to his own insecurities.

David Bohm’s scientific career really began while he was a graduate student at ‘California Institute of Technology’, more popularly referred to as Caltech, and later at the ‘University of California’ at Berkley.

In 1943, he was awarded his PhD in physics while working with the ‘Manhattan Project’, despite not having security clearance to his own research, due to the unusual circumstances and obvious considerable value of the research work.

In 1946, he was hired as an Assistant Professor at ‘Princeton University’ where he worked very closely with Albert Einstein.

In 1949, he was questioned, and arrested two years later, because of Marxist views he’d held during his early college years. He was acquitted the same year but no longer had a position at Princeton.

Bohm took held the position of Professor of Physics at the ‘University of São Paulo’ in Brazil from 1951, the same year he published his first book.

In 1951, David published his first of many books, Quantum Theory, which has since been considered one of the leading authoritative texts on the subject of quantum physics and is a regular part of many post-graduate programs.

In 1957, Bohm and his student cum colleague, Yakir Aharonov, discovered what was coined the Aharonov-Bohm Effect. The basic idea of displayed that the seemingly haphazard movement of electrons concealed an order underlying apparent chaos.

However, his most controversial theory is what Bohm called the ‘Implicate Order’. This theory proposes that matter and life exist as one whole, coherent domain. He believed that the nature of reality couldn't be reduced to segments. That we, through our own thoughts, create the separateness that exists between all things.