[HN Gopher] My Meeting with David Bohm, Tormented Quantum Visionary
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My Meeting with David Bohm, Tormented Quantum Visionary
Author : mathgenius
Score : 92 points
Date : 2023-07-02 14:52 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (johnhorgan.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (johnhorgan.org)
| wwarner wrote:
| 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-...
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| 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.
| ggpsv wrote:
| > 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.
| abhishekjha wrote:
| > 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?
| inciampati wrote:
| 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.
| elashri wrote:
| > 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.
| dav_Oz wrote:
| 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 Godel'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
| iroddis wrote:
| 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.
| scrollbar wrote:
| Thanks for the tip! Also, saw that the article also mentions
| this book in its first paragraph, so sounds worth a read.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| 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.
| the_decider wrote:
| Photons follow wave-particle duality and electromagnetic waves
| can be linked to probability distributions. https://en.m.wikipe
| dia.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
| inciampati wrote:
| 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.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| [?] 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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
| mikrl wrote:
| 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
| notfed wrote:
| Genuinely, I had similar experiences going to church as a
| child.
| mathgenius wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >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.
| frereubu wrote:
| 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).
| convolvatron wrote:
| 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.
| smokel wrote:
| 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.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| 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
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
| Quekid5 wrote:
| He probably just accepts any call he gets from media.
| nopassrecover wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
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