Speaker
Description
What does quantum theory teach us about the nature of reality? This was one of the key questions which motivated David Bohm and which he explored together with Basil Hiley as they worked together in Birkbeck College for thirty years beginning in the early 1960s. It also motivated Basil Hiley as he continued their research program for more than thirty years after Bohm died in 1992. Bohm first tackled the question in the light of the usual ‘Copenhagen’ interpretation in his 1951 book Quantum theory. He emphasized the undivided wholeness of the universe at the quantum level and explored the idea that quantum properties ought to be seen as opposing potentialities which actualize relative to a context, rather than as pre-existing well-defined properties of things that we reveal in an experiment. Bohm’s 1952 ‘hidden variables’ interpretation provided a more complete hypothetical picture of quantum reality and was important as a counterexample to many of the claims of the supporters of the usual interpretation (including Bohm’s own 1951 claims). It also opened up a deeper view of the nature of (in)determinism in physics which Bohm explicated in his 1957 book Causality and Chance in Modern Physics.
In the early 1960s Bohm, together with Hiley, changed his views radically. Instead of focusing on the ‘furniture’ of the world (e.g. particles and fields) they began to discuss the ‘structure’ of the world, suggesting that quantum theory and relativity imply that there exists a deeper ‘implicate’ order where movement and wholeness prevail and from which the familiar ‘explicate order’ of particles and fields, along with space and time unfold. In a series of articles, they also began to examine the nonlocality of Bohm’s 1952 ‘hidden variable’ theory in the implicate order framework. A further idea was to propose that the quantum field in the 1952 theory is not an ordinary physical field but should be understood as carrying active information. These ideas were also used by Bohm, Hiley and myself to tackle broader philosophical issues, such as the relation of mind and matter, which I will briefly describe in this talk.
https://philpeople.org/profiles/paavo-pylkkanen
