For the week preceding his birthday on Friday, my friend Jim was a week younger than I. His daugher's birthday gift to him was the book Why Does E=mc2: And Why Should We Care?, by Brian Cox (the physicist, not the Scottish actor). Jim says that his daughter remembered that he's "still trying to figure out relativity."One of the things that I've been trying to figure out is sort of related to relativity: What did physicist David Bohm (1917-1992) contribute to our understanding of reality? I've seen references to Bohm for decades, prominently in books like Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics (1975) and Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (1979).
Being told of Jim's birthday present, I rushed to tell him about the Rebecca Goldstein novel that I said the other day I'd asked my local library to hold for me: Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics.
I had picked the book up from the library on Jim's birthday and started reading immediately. Trying to comprehend what I'd gotten myself into as I read the first chapter—whose opening sentence is, "The essential fact is that I hate her"—I'd skipped ahead to Goldstein's afterword [pp. 243-44]. I wrote to Jim:
Did you see my post about Rebecca Goldstein? I've started reading her novel, and it has a character based on David Bohm. In the afterword, Goldstein says that,
though Einstein himself had early on declared Bohm his successor, Bohm spent the great bulk of his life in embittered obscurity, in his last years residing in England and teaching at a night college in London.Had you ever heard of David Bohm? I've seen many references to him over the years.
She says that in 1952 he'd presented a "hidden variables" formulation of quantum mechanics, but his former mentor, J. Robert Oppenheimer (they'd both worked on the Manhattan Project),
perhaps more than any other physicist, was responsible for Bohm's being buried alive. He was quoted as suggesting that "if we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him."Goldstein quotes from a personal letter of Bohm:
"I have only one strong emotion left, and that is hatred for the forces that have destroyed so many human beings, including myself. For relative to what I could have become, I regard myself as destroyed."But Bohm's ideas are still alive, Jim. Goldstein concludes the afterword:
Only relatively recently have a growing number of "respectable" physicists begun working with what they have taken to calling "Bohmian mechanics."Maybe learning something about Bohm can help you figure out relativity?
The formidable problem of reconciling quantum mechanics with relativity theory still awaits a solution.
Jim replied:
ReplyDeleteI must say I had never heard of Bohm until your blog. From what I've gleaned from a brief internet perusal of Bohm, it seems Bohm's politics played a big role in his ostracism from the physics community. Obviously Oppenheimer, the head of the Manhattan Project, could not support Bohm because of his ties to communism, whether real or imagined. Einstein's support of Bohm came after WWII, at a time when the genius was over the hill. Einstein may have felt that Bohm was the one to carry on his work, or his support may have been simply a gesture to help Bohm save his professorship at Princeton (which it did not). The question is: Does Bohm's physics have merit? Theories begin as guesses. Quoting Richard Feynman, “It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory (guess) is, it doesn't matter how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is—if it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.” I suspect if Bohm's guesses had been proved correct by experiment (as have Einstein's), then Bohm would be revered or someone else has stolen the credit. But if this is true, why does "the formidable problem of reconciling quantum mechanics with relativity theory still await a solution?"
Really enjoying Why Does E=mc^2. Using Einstein's guesses that the speed of light is constant regardless of the speed of its source (Faraday and Maxwell) and that there is no such thing as "absolute motion" (Galileo), and by simply applying the Pythagorean Theorem, the author, Cox, derived Einstein's formula for determining how much slower a clock in motion runs compared to a clock at rest. Can't wait for the derivation of E=mc^2.
Jim, good analysis! It sounds plausible. Perhaps Bohm's ideas did deserve to be ignored, even aside from his being put down in that time and place as politically suspect. Anyway, adulation from Capra and Zukav may be more deficit than credit, given their sort of New Age cachet. You alert me to read Goldstein's novel even more closely, looking for clues as to her own assessment of the worth of Bohm's "hidden variables."