David Bohm, Quantum Mechanics and Enlightenment

David Bohm, Quantum Mechanics and Enlightenment

The visionary physicist, whose ideas remain influential, sought spiritual as well as scientific illumination

To plumb the implicate order, Bohm said, physicists might need to jettison basic assumptions about nature. During the Enlightenment, thinkers such as Newton and Descartes replaced the ancients’ organic concept of order with a mechanistic view. Even after the advent of relativity and quantum mechanics, “the basic idea is still the same,” Bohm told me, "a mechanical order described by coordinates.”

Bohm hoped scientists would 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 said. “Because it’s worked so well for a while, we’ve assumed that it has to be that way.”

Someday, science and art will merge, Bohm predicted. “This division of art and science is temporary,” he observed. “It didn't exist in the past, and there’s no reason why it should go on in the future.” Just as art consists not simply of works of art but of an “attitude, the artistic spirit,” so does science consist not in the accumulation of knowledge but in the creation of fresh modes of perception. “The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained,” Bohm explained.