Original subtitles

[music playing]

>> When I was younger, I felt that, in the beginning,

that science would surely be a source of benefiting mankind.

I had no question about it.

I began to feel that something beyond science

would be needed to approach this question.

>> It was a night and we were walking under the stars,

black sky, and he looked up to the stars and he said,

ordinarily, when we look to the sky and look to the stars,

we think of stars as objects far out and vast spaces between

them.

He said, there's another way we can look at it.

We can look at the vacuum at theemptiness instead as a planum,

as infinitely full ratherthan infinitely empty,

and that the material objects themselves

are like little bubbles, littlevacancies in this vast sea.

So David Bohm, in asense, was using that view

to have me look at the starsand to have a sense of the night

sky all of a sudden in a different way as one

whole living organism and these little bits

that we call matter is just little holes in it.

He often mentioned just one other aspect of this.

That this planum, in a cubic centimeter of the planet,

there is more energy matter than in the entire visible universe.

>> David Bohm was a physicist, philosopher,

explorer of consciousness.

The man Einstein called his spiritual son and the Dalai

Lama his science guru.

But his ideas were a threat to his peers in the science

community, as well as to the government.

As a result, he would pay a great price

for sharing them at a timein history that was fraught

and with a world that wasnot ready to receive them.

This is the story of his life and his explorations

in physics, philosophy, and consciousness and a search

for unity and wholeness at the crossroads of science

and spirituality.

[music playing]

Since the dawn of man, humanity has

been haunted with fundamental questions

about the nature of existence.

Who are we?

Where did we come from?

What is our purpose?

What is reality?

>> Buddha himself expressedto his fellow monks,

scholars should not accepthis teaching out of faith,

but rather thoroughinvestigation and experiment.

Therefore, we trained that way.

Always why, why, why, why, why?

Not easily say yes.

>> Classical physics promoted mechanism by suggesting that

everything should be predictable and controllable.

To see three dimensional space as absolute.

Time as a singular linear progression

and our sensory experiences as reality itself.

But when one begins to understand

the true nature of reality and our place within it,

these assumptions become obstacles.

Quantum theory was born around 1900.

1905 saw Einstein's theory of relativity.

Then in 1925, Heisenberg looked into the heart of nature

and created quantum mechanics.

This was followed by Niels Bohr's Copenhagen

interpretation.

Then quantum field theory.

This was followed decades later by the famous theory

of everything, when scientists started

to believe that the end of physics was in sight.

1980s and 1990s we developed a protocol,

a theory of everything that wasgoing to resolve everything,

but it somehow didn't quite work out.

There's something missing.

Maybe we should look wider.

Quantum physics is the description of the smallest

things in the universe.

The things that we do not see in our everyday world of space

and time, such as atoms, molecules,

and the tiny invisible particles which

form the entire underlying structure of the universe.

Quantum physics is also the basis for multi-billion dollar

industries.

Every time you turn on your mobile or tablet,

you're invoking the fundamental laws of the universe.

It's a world that defies any description that is limited

to ordinary space and time.

It's a mysterious place, where relative space collapses,

linear time ceases to be.

Everything in the known universe emerges from it.

Everything we are and everything we do is dependent on it.

While all this is incredible, the scientific orthodoxy

had not been able to successfully reconcile

the two big breakthroughs of the early 20th century, quantum

mechanics and general relativity,

into a unified theory.

The equations that Einstein wrote in the early 20th century

and the mathematics used to describe quantum mechanics

simply could not talk to each other.

They were fundamentally incompatible.

And so physics remained polarized.

Its chief protagonist, Niels Bohr on one side

and Albert Einstein on the other,

unable to agree on what constitutes

the true nature of reality.

>> I mean, in a certain sense,I can respect people like Niels

Bohr who said, well, OK, thisis what you're supposed to do,

don't ask questions.

But I don't like that point of view of myself.

It doesn't make sense to me.

I said, no, no, we really want a theory which hangs, together

and Bohm was a leading figure in that,

and I think I very much respect him in that particular regard.

>> Quantum mechanics is reallyabout explaining the properties

of the microscopic world, thematerials our bodies are made

of, our brains are made up atthe very microscopic level.

General relativity, orrelativity theory in general,

is about explaining the largestcosmic dimensions spacetime,

gravity, the whole macroscopic order of the cosmos.

And so you can imagine that this macroscopic cosmic level

needs to be connected to this super subatomic quantum level.

How can this be done?

And the two theories describing these two realms really

can't do that, and they have not been compatible with each other

since their inception and since quantum mechanics was

developed there was a tension between the two.

[lightning striking]

>> Does this mean that the two approaches can never be

resolved?

>> My interest moved more toward understanding the fundamentals

of physics and quantum mechanics and relativity,

and I became especially interested in how it leads to--

these fundamental theories are not clear.

That their basic ideas are unclear,

and they contradict each other.

>> Bohm was thinking verydeeply about them and said, OK,

we don't need a new idea.

We don't need a new theory.

We don't need a new bit of mathematics, which

everybody else was trying.

What we need is a radicallynew order of physics.

>> As you can imagine, thisrocked the foundations that

have been set by thefounding fathers of physics,

but perhaps as Bohm was suggesting,

it was time for a new lawto describe both the seen

and the unseen.

>> With that absolute contradiction of the two basic

theories, I said, we could try to find out what they had

in common, and what they have in common is what I call undivided

wholeness.

>> Just as Copernicus had upended cosmological thought

in the 16th century by suggesting that the Earth was

in orbit around the sun and not vise versa,

so too was Bohm starting to intuit that we needed

a fundamentally new way to describe the connection between

the macro and the micro.

>> My feeling is that that gavean insight to Bohm that this

world we live in, this is all hard and fast.

The experts could order.

This is it.

It's really just a surface order,

it's not a deep profound order, and there's

something lies underneath it, which

he called the implicate order.

So the implicate order is not so much

a set of objects but a process.

It's a process of constant movement

constantly unfolding and unfolding.

So the expected order comes out of the implicate.

>> David Bohm was suggesting that everything is internally

related to everything else and that each part of the cosmos

contains the whole universe and unfolds into our perception

of reality.

>> He would go into biology and say, look,

this is the way biological systems develop.

Nature is surely more organic, and yet, we're

trying to do in our quantum mechanics just

to make it mechanical.

Perhaps we should move into that area

and say that there is amore organic way of thinking

about life in general.

[music playing]

>> That's the key.

That's the deepest hidden level of reality.

The gate of all wonders.

>> Exploring the philosophicalimplications of both physics

and consciousness, Bohm'squestioning of the scientific

orthodoxy was the expressionof a rare and maverick

intelligence in whichmuch of his most important

contributions wereexpressions of inner feelings,

which date back to his early unhappy childhood.

David was born in Wilkes-Barreon December the 20th, 1917.

A coal mining town, once the energy supplier of the world.

It had been hit by a seriouseconomic slump caused

in large part by the declininguse of coal as a source of fuel

in industry.

>> There was a great deal ofunemployment and suffering

and people were out of jobsand banks were failing.

People were talking aboutthings getting very bad, even

revolution, and then Roosevelt came in

and he produced all these new measures,

which gave people hope, you see, and I

think they lifted things up a little bit

and gave people some hope thatat least it would get better.

>> His mother was hospitalizedon several occasions from

mental illness, and his fatherwas distant and disapproved

of his son's interest in science,

hoping instead that David wouldone day take over the family

business.

Life for the young David was not ideal.

>> Bohm was unhappy.

He was unhappy at home,unhappy with his father running

a used furniture sales shop.

Ambition was that Bohm wouldown the biggest furniture sales

shop in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Bohm didn't want to do that.

He wanted to explore ideas, and his father

wasn't very happy about that, and he

felt he lived in a rather brutal world.

One day, he would hold upa science fiction story

called "The Skylark of Space"about a boy who travels off

to other planets in a spaceship.

That was his dream.

If I can go to other planets, they'll be ideal worlds.

So for him, this world we live in,

this world of space and time is rather imperfect.

It's an illusion, and beyond that is a much deeper reality.

That was his school vision, and then

as he grows up and becomes older,

that becomes his vision of what he called the implicate order.

That beyond the everyday Newtonian world view,

there's a much deeper order he called the implicate order,

and that was what he was groping towards.

How do we uncover this deeper order of the world?

[music playing]

>> One day with a group of friends,

he was forced to cross the stream by means

of steppingstones.

>> I was with some boys and we were in the mountains near

Wilkes-Barre crossing a rather rapidly flowing stream,

and there were a lot of rocks we had to cross and they were

really far apart and very small, and we couldn't just step

across them, and I felt very apprehensive.

It was in the new situation.

But I suddenly realized you had to jump from one to the other

without stopping in between it.

You were in a state of movement, pivoting on one rock

while you move to the next, whereas I usually

thought of going from one step to another.

It was mapping out the steps.

After that, I felt that--

know it made a deep impression on me,

that this theme has recurred a lot in my work,

that your consciousness is going moment by moment of awareness

and not mapped out.

>> Despite his father'sdisapproval of his interest

in science, the young Bohmproved to be an exceptional

student, writing his unified theory of the cosmos,

one that integrated mind andmatter while still at school.

>> I think this was combinedwith some tendency to want

to go beyond limits.

You see, when I was in thissmall city of Wilkes-Barre

and see that the nearest towns around that

were called Ashley, SugarNotch, and Warrior Run,

so that's all I knew.

I mean, I didn't know them.

I know about them.

And when we went for a ride beyond Warrior Run,

it seemed like going beyond the world, you see.

>> Having finished high school, the young Bohm moved to Penn

State University, where he graduated with a physics

degree.

His exceptional ability in mathematics and physics

secured him a scholarship to move to Caltech in California.

There, he met with Robert Oppenheimer,

who was sufficiently impressed with Bohm

to arrange for him to transferto the University of Berkeley,

where Oppenheimer headedup the physics department.

With a sense of rejection from his own father,

Bohm had sought fatherfigures, and it was clear

that Robert Oppenheimerwas to fulfill that role.

>> He became a student of Oppenheimer to do a PhD,

and this was just before Oppenheimer went off to set up

Los Alamos, the nuclear facility.

So one day, when Oppenheimer was going off to Los Alamos,

Bohm would have liked to have joined him,

but he couldn't get clearance, partly

because he joined the Communist Party of America

for nine months, and then what he was joining it

for was to try and see if he could find people

so they could discuss Hegel with them.

He finally wanted-- didn't even know who Hegel was,

so he got totally disinterested and didn't go again.

But because of actually paying a fee,

he got smeared with communism.

Bohm's mathematical calculationsproved useful to the Manhattan

Project in their quest to buildthe world's first atomic bomb,

but the brigadier general in charge

told Oppenheimer that Bohm was to be kept out.

He suspected Bohm might be a communist spy.

Denied security clearance, Bohm lost access to his own work,

making it impossible for him to complete his thesis.

>> He said, I can't write the thesis,

because the papers have been classified.

And Oppenheimer said, OK, just let's get the papers,

I'll give you a PhD.

>> Oppenheimer needed Bohm's work and had a very important

job to do.

But little did Bohm know that his early philosophical

idealism, coupled with unfolding global unease,

would have a dramatic impact on the trajectory

that his life would take from now on.

>> The Americans were building an atom bomb.

The Germans and the Russians are at war,

and it's our duty to help the Russians.

Many scientists, including Oppenheimer,

felt we should talk to the president

and suggest maybe we should tell the Russians what we're doing.

In fact, the President of United States at that time

was in agreement with that, but it

was Churchill who overruled him, and said, are you crazy?

No, know don't tell the Russians anything.

But that was it.

There was a sympathy.

Maybe the Russians should know alittle bit of what we're doing,

so maybe there was sympathy among some

of Oppenheimer's students.

>> Oppenheimer had gatheredaround him a circle

of exceptional research students.

Oppenheimer himself supportedcommunist organizations

and groups.

For Bohm, politics andphysics were inseparable,

and he soon discovered thatseveral of Oppenheimer students

were interested in what theytermed The Russian Experiment,

in which a Marxist society would lead

to the transformation of the individual.

This idea also played into Bohm's work

in physics, where he saw parallels

between the movement of electrons

and the possibility of individual human freedom.

This led Bohm to one of his most important early discoveries,

the theory of the plasma in metals.

>> A plasma is called the fourth state of matter.

There's gases, there's liquids, there's solids,

and the phosphate is like a gas in which the gases are

charged particles.

So it would be a bit like what happens around the sun.

You have a gas of charged particles, and in a metal,

the idea was a metal you'd have a lattice, where

all the nuclear in the lattice, the charge.

An electron runs through.

There's a gas of electrons running through,

and Bohm's idea was like, can I look at the gas?

Can I find a theory for this gas?

What he found was that the extent to which

an electron participated in this gas, it became relatively free.

So it went back to his old idea about the Russian experiment.

To what extent-- if I am a member of the collective-- can

I have individual freedom?

It seems a paradox.

If I'm a member of the collective,

then I don't have freedom.

I'm part of the group.

But he found to the extent to which an electron participated

in the plasma, it became free.

It became free of the interaction of other electrons,

so he began to say, yes, within the plasma,

within the collective, there can be individual freedom.

So it was both a theory of the plasma in metals

and the theory of freedom in the collective.

>> Now having set up that plasma physics,

he was recognized by the people in Berkeley,

and he was offered a job at Princeton University.

Remember, Einstein was at the Advanced Study Institute,

but he was offered a job at Princeton,

because they taught him a very talented

young American physicist.

>> He went to Princeton, andhe took a room in a house next

door to Einstein so he would meet Einstein,

they become close, he would goto Einstein-- in the evening,

Einstein would have Germanexpatriates over playing

the cello, violin, have concerts,

and he would go to thoseand talk a lot to Einstein.

>> Dear Mr. Bohm, your letter has interested me very much.

I am very astonished about your announcement

to establish some connectionbetween the formalism

of quantum theory andrelativistic field theory.

I must confess that I am not able to guess

how such unification could be achieved.

>> Einstein said that he felt Bohm was his spiritual son.

>> In this period, Bohm also wrote a standard textbook

on quantum theory, which presented the orthodox

Copenhagen interpretation of the theory,

as outlined by Niels Bohr.

>> He then was asked to give a course on quantum mechanics,

and he gave an orthodox course on quantum mechanics.

At the end of the course, he thought, well,

I don't really understand this quantum mechanics.

So it's the best thing to do if you don't understand

something is to write a book.

So he then wrote a book, which he entitled "Quantum Theory,"

which had a reputation of being one

of the best books on quantum theory at the time.

He was describing standard quantum mechanics,

Bohr's point of view.

He was trying to defend Bohr's point of view.

Had a lot of discussions about Bohr's point of view,

as well as some very interesting applications

of quantum mechanics.

And it was there by looking at Bohr

that he became very interested in this notion of wholeness.

A notion, which he carried into a much more general situations,

as he got clearer and clearer how

wholeness was arising in the quantum structure itself.

>> However, Bohm began to feel that something was not quite

right about Niels Bohr's interpretation,

believing that it placed a limit on what could be said about

the quantum world.

[music playing]

The quantum domain is the subatomic realm.

The world of the smallest things in the universe.

All that is invisible to the naked eye.

Since the 1920s, there has been one experiment,

which puts us up against all the paradoxes

and mysteries of nature.

The double slit experiment, which

showed how everything we assumed about electrons

since their discovery in the 19th century had been wrong.

If we fire electrons through twoslits, they start as particles,

but instead of creating two distinct bands

on the wall and the other side, they in fact

create an interference pattern like waves.

In an effort to decode this mystery,

physicists decided to put ameasuring detector by one slit,

but when they did, theelectrons did not produce

any interference pattern.

The very act of conscious observation

collapse the wave pattern, and the electrons

returned once again to behaving like particles.

How is this possible?

What could be influencing this curious behavior?

This paradox has been an accepted part

of orthodox quantum physics.

One that Niels Bohr claimed could not

be probed or explained.

But Bohm was developing a strong hunch

that there must be something underneath the seemingly

quixotic nature of electrons.

That there was a process or a potential that somehow

informed their behavior.

>> Bohr had this idea that we could not say anything about

the underlying reality, and people have taken that also

to mean that they may not be an underlying reality.

Einstein completely disagreed with this point of view.

He thought there must be an underlying reality,

and this underlying reality would

produce the effects we actually see in our instruments.

Now, the question then was, what is the underlying reality?

>> Bohm was saying, yes, we can talk about quantum objects,

we can talk about the quantum world,

but the quantum world is radically different from

the classical world.

[music playing]

>> Bohm felt that something mysterious was happening,

and the key for Bohm is that what we observe as distinct

and separate in our everyday world of space and time is,

in fact, connected and not separate at the deeper quantum

level, because they are part of a single system where

separation does not exist.

But while Bohm continued to be preoccupied

with such questions, his communist leanings,

coupled with concerns at LosAlamos about possible leaks

of classified informationto the Russians,

was to impact dramaticallyon his life within physics,

and ultimately, his own viewof the scientific orthodoxy.

>> McCarthyism had suddenly come back to the fore the Korean

War, and McCarthy was trying to get people to testify against

colleagues at Berkeley and Los Alamos.

And David Bohm was asked to testify and he refused.

>> He was asked to give names.

He refused to give names, and as a result of that,

he was arrested for contempt of Congress.

>> He wanted to plead the First Amendment,

which is freedom of speech, but the lawyer suggested, no,

that will be a difficult thing to get out of.

You must plead the Fifth Amendment,

and the trouble with the Fifth Amendment

is that it's essentially preventing you

from incriminating yourself.

McCarthy was absolutely frustrated with all

these people refusing to testify,

so he put to the Supreme Court that it

should be illegal to be madeillegal or unconstitutional

to plead the Fifth Amendment in this case.

And one day, when Bohm was in Princeton,

a Sheriff came and actually arrested him,

and he was arrested because he was using the Fifth Amendment.

The interesting story here is that he

said the Sheriff was a very intelligent Sheriff,

and they had a discussion on the foundations of quantum

mechanics as he was driven from Princeton

to Washington, which is unbeliev-- but typical

David Bohm.

Then he was bailed, but very shortly after the bail,

the high court ruled that it was not

unconstitutional to plead the fifth, and so he was released.

But because he had been enmeshed in this mess,

the principal or the head of the University

banned him from the campus.

[music playing]

Einstein actually wanted him to become his assistant,

but Oppenheimer objected.

In fact, Oppenheimer saw Bohm at Princeton once, and said,

I thought I asked you to get out of the country, because I

think for your own safety, you should leave the country.

>> This was crushing to David Bohm on many levels.

Just as he was gaining professional momentum

and respect within the science community,

his own mentor and surrogate father figure

was telling him to get lost.

Given Oppenheimer's power at the time,

Bohm was quickly shunned by peers and friends.

>> I know he did write toEinstein asked him to help him,

but no.

The only thing was to leave the United States and go to Brazil.

So he had no future in the States.

He just had to leave, and that was it.

[plane revving]

[music playing]

>> Though he was able to get a teaching position

at the University of Sao Paulo, exile was a chilling

experience.

At Princeton, he had been surrounded by friends.

His work on plasmas was recognized as significant.

His book on quantum theory was considered the best,

but Bohm found a way to turn exiled to his advantage.

With this distance, he was able to look

at the impasse between Einstein and Niels Bohr

with new perspective in a paperentitled "Hidden Variables."

>> Bohm realized that thesuccess of quantum mechanics,

success in predictions of quantum mechanics,

and also the stability of quantum mechanics,

where evidences offer a new kind,

a new type of physical theories.

>> Well, he had really questioned the orthodox

interpretation of Bohr and Heisenberg and Copenhagen

interpretation, and he decided to develop his own approach,

which he called hidden variables.

>> In the decades to come,hidden variables would become

a key component to Bohm'sintellectual legacy.

But in 1952, it sparked hostility

and would serve to finish himin the eyes of the physics

orthodoxy.

Bohm's hidden variables stated that the behavior of quantum

particles were not chance processes,

for the motion of electrons were guided by underlying pilot

waves.

[music playing]

When he finished his paper,he sent it for publication,

believing it would act asa shock wave to physicists.

>> And that was what he wanted.

Some people say, no, I want to be accepted.

No, it's not that I want to be accepted.

I want to open the door tothe debate that he felt was--

with the Copenhagen interpretation,

the orthodoxy had closed the door.

There was a bit of controversy, but let's close the door.

Let's all agree.

We'll all come together, we'll come to Copenhagen,

we'll all have some meetings, we'll have a lot of arguments,

but in the end, we'll agree, OK, we all believe the same thing.

No, Bohm said, I want to open it up.

So that's what he felt. And when this paper comes out,

it will cause great controversy.

He's in Brazil, the paper appears, nothing.

He hears nothing.

He only heard from one person.

de Broglie's assistant.

That's it.

He heard nothing.

And he was shocked.

Why?

Why is there nothing?

Why aren't people writing to me?

Why is there no controversy?

>> This deeply puzzled Bohm,and it was only later that he

discovered the reason.

>> There was a student who hadread Bohm's paper in Princeton

when Bohm wasn't in thecountry and took the paper

to Oppenheimer and said,look, this is what Bohm wrote.

Nobody refers to it, nobody's discussing it.

What's wrong with it?

And Oppenheimer said nothing.

>> And Oppenheimer had called a conference at Princeton,

invited the leading physicists to discuss Bohm's paper

and find a flaw in the argument.

And if we cannot find an error in Bohm,

we must all agree to ignore him.

So word went out, ignore Bohm, and that's

what Oppenheimer had done.

Ignore Bohm, and that was a-- for Bohm, a tremendous shock.

>> Few people laughed, few people cried.

I remembered the line from Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita,

now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.

[explosion]

[music playing]

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