My Meeting with David Bohm | Hacker News Reader

My Meeting with David Bohm

johnhorgan.org

118 pointsmathgenius43 comments

My Dad (physicist, member of the national academy) was familiar with David Bohm (maybe from the Institute for Advanced Study?). After enjoying several YouTube conversations between Bohm and Krishnamurti, I researched Bohm, and it sounded like he got a raw deal, then left the US. My Dad who is very conventional didn’t seem to like Bohm when I brought him up in conversation a few years ago. All that said, Bohm seemed like such a cool guy when he was talking with Krishnamurti.

I, too, was once quite interested in Bohm's work and dug up what I could on his personal life to understand his career trajectory from USA to Brazil to England. While I think he was genuinely brilliant, he seemed to have a personality that led him to escalate social confrontations. Career progress depends not just on the quality of your ideas but also on how well you interact with your community, and I think that's what hurt him.

That didn't just hurt him sport, it hurt us all...

This is the future of "moderation"...

Tim Maudlin was recently on Mindscape [0] talking about renewed interest in pilot wave theory, updated to allow non-locality to account for entanglement. It’s a good interview.

[0] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/06/26/241-...

Funnily enough, the first half of that interview was successful in killing my last bit of curiosity about arguing over interpretations of QM. He talked about young physics students eager to learn about the fundamental nature of the universe and wondered that senior physicists weren't eager to engage with these issues. I was interested to hear from someone dedicating themself to this field but the resulting conversation was so boring.

Copenhagen was messy because it introduced measurement as a separate process which is inelegant. The Everett interpretation preserves linear evolution but is messy because Schrodinger's cat experiment ends up with two cats (which seems like a mischaracterisation of MWI but whatever). Bohmian mechanics is good because it doesn't have the measurement problem and that Everettian weirdness. The conceit of having both particle and wave was brushed over because he didn't feel like it was too strange.

I listened with increasing apathy to a discussion on vibes about untestable and mathematically equivalent theories and when I got home I read Scott Aaronson's post 'The Zen Anti-Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics' and knew it for the first time.

No way. BM is like the last vestige of physics as the study of nature in the way ancient Greeks/Aristotle (grandad of much of science, father of biology and all) understood it. To go a-interpretational about physics is a two-millennia long paradigm shift. To me that’s why BM is so interesting. Non-local Hidden variables keep that tradition alive in a recognizable way.

The Greeks set us up for 2500 years of scientific progress in this vein. If probability becomes subjective (MWI) or we detach science from nature by going interpretation-less we have no concise foundation to propel science for years and years.

I’m not saying this is a reason to believe BM, but it’s by far the most conservative and in line with how we made progress before.

QM really really did a number on most physicists. Like Nima-Arkani Hamed says, radical conservatism is the best approach in physics. Anything but BM is just radical when we have the history of science we do.

I don’t think BM is necessarily right like I said, but its role is fascinating in this respect.

Past ways can be over encumbering, as a mitigating factor to BM. But I think physics has yet to require complete paradigm shift that I see in other/non interpretations.

> Schrodinger's cat experiment ends up with two cats

Why is this messy? Double slit experiment demonstrates '2 electrons'. Why is left electron right electron any different than dead cat alive cat?

All of those statements were Maudlin's opinions. I personally don't see why it's objectionable for two branches of the wavefunction to exist simultaneously past entanglement with an outside system, but most of all I just don't care anymore.

I heard this interview as well, and found it quite fascinating, especially that there's now an idea for an experimental test of pilot waves vs. other interpretations.

I didn't consider pilot wave theory a serious contender, he kinda changed my mind. Though I did think he kinda glossed over the objection that it's not a properly relativistic theory.

I found a Bohm through the excellent book What is Real by Adam Becker. It was one of the first books that advocated the philosophy of science that I’d encountered, and it was fascinating.

Warning: If you’re a huge fan of Bohr and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, you may not enjoy it as much.

Thanks for the tip! Also, saw that the article also mentions this book in its first paragraph, so sounds worth a read.

Great find, thanks for sharing. Bohm was so far ahead of his time - he still would be - and yet we need more of this thinking for the times we find ourselves in.

There is hardly any argument that “hard science” can explain everything. Physics et al. is limited to models (maps); objective truth (territory) is the realm of philosophy.

Too bad that the latter is being subordinate to the former as of late.

> Of course, Bohm says, you can never truly plumb your own mind; any attempt to examine your thought changes it--just as the measurement of an electron alters its course. We cannot achieve final self-knowledge, Bohm seems to imply, any more we can achieve a final theory of physics.

I found Bohm through Krishnamurti, which is all I have to say about whatever bias I have on this subject. So, of course, I was nodding along as I read this article.

> Bohm hopes scientists will eventually move beyond mechanistic and even mathematical paradigms. “We have an assumption now that’s getting stronger and stronger that mathematics is the only way to deal with reality,” Bohm says. “Because it’s worked so well for a while, we’ve assumed that it has to be that way.”

Bohm's ideas on implicate order and his call to move past the mechanistic paradigm reminds me of E.F. Schumacher's critique on "materialistic scientism" and its limitations in the face of the unknown:

> Since the findings of science, on account of its methodical restriction and its systematic disregard of higher levels, never contain any evidence of the existence of such levels, the process is self-reinforcing: faith, instead of being taken as a guide leading the intellect to an understanding of the higher levels, is seen as opposing and rejecting the intellect and is therefore itself rejected.

I appreciate that Bohm opened a door for me into a subject which I was not intrinsically interested in, and I'm looking forward to what comes out of this conversation in the years ahead.

> any attempt to examine your thought changes it--just as the measurement of an electron alters its course.

Wait a minute. Isn’t this factually wrong? I mean the uncertainty in measurement is not brought by the experiment perturbing the system but something inherent to the system. We know how much we are perturbing the system. We can always subtract that from the calculation and the system still ends up having uncertainty.

Not a physicist, can somebody correct me if there’s something wrong?

Bohm is completely correct. It is impossible to think about something without changing your own thought of it. Or more specifically, memory, is changed by remembering. This has been demonstrated in a very literal way, in that amyloid secondary structures that are key to memory are transformed by neuronal activation. See https://scitechdaily.com/surprisingly-historically-misunders... for a summary. These systems are absolutely quantum scale.

Measurement perturbs the system, always. Most of the time (radar speed check on a car, e.g.), the perturbation is so small as to be insignificant.

When one bounces a photon off an electron to measure its position, though, one moves it.

Likewise, when one uses a magnetic field to detect an electron, one deflects it.

Add to that that position is poorly defined for such quantized objects in the first place, and things only get fuzzier.

bohm here is talking about the observer effect, which is distinct from, though has historically been conflated with, the uncertainty principle. the former refers to how measurement unavoidably affects a system, whereas the latter is an inherent limit to accuracy effecting all wave-like systems

This is where they lost me:

> Someday, science and art will merge, Bohm predicts. “This division of art and science is temporary,” he observes. “It didn't exist in the past, and there’s no reason why it should go on in the future.”

I think the whole "Two Cultures" criticism [1] was valid, even if it is often over-simplified. (Less so today in that we live in an age of context collapse.) And yes, high modernism is, thank goodness, on its last legs. But there are actual reasons that there are divisions between art and science in terms of purpose and method. I'm open to the notion that we could use more art in science, but handwaving the distinction away like this strikes me as cheap mysticism, not a real argument.

Maybe I'm especially sensitive to this because I recently went with a friend to see Michio Kaku talk about his book "Quantum Supremacy". Many in the audience were apparently impressed, and I'm told Kaku at one point really knew his stuff. But the talk I saw was a shambling mess, where basic errors of fact about quantum computing were used to justify technoutopian mysticism that was just a modern, high-tech gloss on quantum woo. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures

[2] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quantum_woo

My LinkedIn feed included a few quantum computing leaders seething about him recently and it seems that no one who works in the industry/academia (building stuff) takes him seriously.

So glad to hear it. After the talk I nearly had an out of body experience in the lobby afterward hearing people talk positively about what to me was a hot mess.

Genuinely, I had similar experiences going to church as a child.

That struck me too - Brian Eno said the same at a talk of his I attended. He has friends in both disciplines and remarked on how different the thought processes and methods are. I studied both sculpture (to BA level) and neuroscience (to MSc level) and feel the same. This sounds like one of those things that people from one discipline say after a shallow engagement with the other. (In my definition of "shallow" I include people who have seemingly spent quite a bit of time studying something, but somehow seem to miss its essence, much as that sounds like a "no true Scotsman" argument).

I'm an engineer, not a scientist, but I've worked a lot with them, and also worked for many years directly with artists. I think we can work together much more constructively than we do. but in each of those three areas, we really do approach work in a very different way. in the end, I think the differences are a net positive, but they certainly have to be managed.

There certainly is a cultural division, but maybe there is no fundamental distinction to be made. Both art and science help us make sense of the world. They both tell stories, about an apparently objective reality. They both excite and inspire, and enable us to transcend a limited point-of-view.

If we take science and art to be the same greater thing, then I'd look at it in terms of constraints. Science could be defined as the subset of art that's about seeking maximally accurate representations of aspect of reality. In the same vein, math is a different subset, one that's maximizing self-consistency. Other types of art - i.e. the things we normally call art - have their own sets of constraints.

Math and science are thus special in the sense that their constraints - self-consistency and accurate representation of objective reality - give powerful, direct practical benefits. Other forms of art can have practical use too, e.g. by moving people, or refining their beliefs (or convincing them of lies in the interest of those who commissioned the art - that's advertising and propaganda).

Another way in which math and science are special is that their constraints are independent of humans. Where other forms of art are necessarily a function of how people perceive and feel, the output of science and mathematics is, in principle, universal. I don't know of any other form of art like this.

I haven't read the book but Scott Aaronson agrees with you.

> So I can now state with confidence: beating out a crowded field, this is the worst book about quantum computing, for some definition of the word “about,” that I’ve ever encountered.

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7321

Ah, thanks. That's helpful. Amazingly, the talk was even worse. Which suggests to me that there are a bunch of people in the editorial chain who are propping him up.

He probably just accepts any call he gets from media.

It is a sad state of affairs that in general, the humanities have less robust knowledge about the world, yet make more noise than scientists, who have more constructive knowledge, but are not understood by the general public.

The net effect is that the public is almost always terribly misinformed.

This to me sounds a lot like a Two Cultures view on the high modernist side. It seems hopelessly outdated to me. Personally, I'm much more concerned about scientists and technologists who ignore the humanities than vice versa.

Ouch, that was not my intention. The problem I see is in the lack of rigour for obtaining and sharing knowledge.

A lot of research in the social sciences, almost by definition, deals with extremely complex interactions that are hardly possible to say anything constructive about. For example, one cannot reproduce experiments, nor objectively measure things such as, say, happiness.

On the other hand, most contemporary research in the exact sciences, such as quantum computation, is so hard to understand, that one needs a PhD in a respective field to even reasonably talk about it.

Obviously, I should have avoided to make this sweeping kind of generalisation, but from my personal experience this dichotomy at least exists in the fields that I am interested in (e.g. mathematics and physics on one side, contemporary art and philosophy of mind on the other side).

It is not even the culture that is different, it is the method being used, and the matter being studied that differs.

Is this still considered an outdated view? And how should I go about changing my perspective?

I really like it if someone crosses the boundaries of these two domains, but I have found very few inspiring authors who do so successfully. Any hints would be greatly appreciated.

>But there are actual reasons that there are divisions between art and science in terms of purpose and method.

I would say something with similar ideas much differently.

Current scientists and artists suffer from a distinctly large division of purpose and method which simplifies and diminishes both art and science. That is, there's too much of a difference and not enough overlap in both. And there is a vacuum which needs to be filled with things that can't be fit into a neat split between one or the other.

Not that things heavy with one kind of purpose and method or the other are wrong, we just need a lot more people who are a lot more competent at both at the same time.

People do try and have been talking about it for a long time, unfortunately there is a strong tendency towards rambling nonsense about one side or the other. You do indeed end up with a lot of shitty mysticism.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance influenced me the most on the topic probably because it was my first exposure. If you can recognize and filter out the influence of the author's megalomania, there's quite a lot there.

> Bohm rejects the claim of Stephen Hawking and others that physics can achieve a final theory, or “theory of everything,” that explains the world. Science is an infinite, “inexhaustible process,” Bohm says

I don't know who he was referring to by `and others` but I'm pretty sure that `final theory` that Hawking and many people are trying hard to get is not about explaining everything. It should be a theory that explains fundamental forces/particles and their interactions. So the term `everything` is well-defined, and it is far from the everyday usage of the word `everything`. A theory of everything would not necessarily address all aspects of existence or answer questions beyond the realm of fundamental physics.

In physics ToE ("Theory of Everything") is shorthand for a theoretical framework - mathematically formalized - which unifies all observable fundamental forces in nature (observable universe/s) without contradiction. Depending on your worldview like everything has a material basis, the fundamental "reality" is mathematical ... this would literally translate to mean a ToE.

But even the most materialistic/platonic "fanatics" out there acknowledge the basic limitation from a ultimate theory like this: the emergent properties arising from it could in turn be infinitely complex i.e. not wholly predictable, so what we are left with is describing and taming those to our satisfaction.

This all of course can be construed purely phenomenologically therefore minimizing any metaphysical claims like "underlying reality" and it would amount to the same conclusion. This is how I understand Penrose when he addresses this via Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

In this regard I personally like Feynman's pragmatism the most here by acting as a mediator between theoretical-minded and experimental-minded physiscts: Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?" No, I'm not. I'm just looking to find out more about the world and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it; that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers and we're just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that's the way it is. ... My interest in science is to simply find out more about the world.

So echoing Bohr's reply to Einstein: "Stop telling God what to do" One could reply to Bohm as well: If it is a process let it be a process, it doesn't have to be fixed as finite or infinite or whatever.

To be fair with Bohm he openly questioned many concepts taken for granted and for the moment tried to deconstruct them in a sincere manner (see: fish tank analogy). In a sense he tried to subject his worldview itself to this flow of procedural thinking. But being basically a lifelong outcast in the physics community I can not help but hear the hurt of rejection and the deep longing for connection to openly and passionately challenge and discuss ideas.[0]

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohm_Dialogue

Bohm was one pf the last visionaries but I feel he is wrong.

Light is never a particle, it is always a wave. It only appears to us as a particle.

Think about that! It means also that everything is always a wave! And if everything is a wave nothing is separate from anything else. That will explain spooky action at a distance.

A particle is only a probability wave. And our mind cannot handle probabilities, it needs certainly. Do to create certainty it collapses the probability to provide us with the most probably outcome.

Photons follow wave-particle duality and electromagnetic waves can be linked to probability distributions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon#:~:text=A%20photon%20.... However, unlike electrons, photons have no exclusion principle (aka you can’t have multiple electrons in the same position) nor a repulsive potential. So the same probability wave can apply to countless photons. If you “reach into” a high amplitude portion (high probability) of an electromagnetic wave, you will “scoop out” a handful of photons. If you reach into a zero amplitude portion of the wave, you will scoop out none

This is a nice idea, but this line of thinking will lead to some very unusual results. The most famous is possibly the "ultraviolet catastrophe" that Planck resolved by developing a theory of quantized states and quanta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_catastrophe.

This theory suggests that electromagnetic radiation can be understood in terms of quantized particles, a fact that has immense experimental support.

The fact that atoms, the larger of which we can directly observe individually, behave like waves also explains why the duality exists.

Everything being a wave does not solve entanglement. At least it's not clear why it would.

√ This theory suggests that electromagnetic radiation can be understood in terms of quantized particles, a fact that has immense experimental support.

You're assuming that the quantized particles are not also waves.

As far as adam, you'll note that smaller waves are much easier to spot in the ocean then really large amplitude waves. The fact that we see Adams behaving his waves could me or not the ways are small enough for us to see them.

> This is a nice idea, but this line of thinking will lead to some very unusual results. The most famous is possibly the "ultraviolet catastrophe" that Planck resolved by developing a theory of quantized states and quanta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_catastrophe.

Quantization is real. But I've never seen any phenomenon that can only be explained in terms of the full concept of a particle (which is a decidedly nonrigorous one in any case), and while the concept of a quantized wave is certainly counterintuitive, I'd argue it's simpler and more consistent than wave-particle duality.

Bohm in his own words about light: "Light is this background which is all one but its information-content has the capacity for immense diversity. Light can carry information about the entire universe. The other point is that light, by interactions of different rays, (as field theory in physics is investigating today), can produce particles and all the diverse structures of matter."

> Such a view reduces quantum mechanics to “a system of formulas that we use to make predictions or to control things technologically. I said that's not enough. I don’t think I would be very interested in science if that were all there was.”

I don't pretend to have an informed opinion on quantum mechanics or pilot wave theory, but "I wouldn't be interested in science if that were all there was" is not much of an argument.

Your feelings don't enter into it. Einstein didn't like it, either, but he didn't manage to replace it.

It goes beyond "feeling". Without adequate understanding, you can't penetrate further and move the science forward. Calculations alone are simply not enough.

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