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Howard Switzer's avatar

Elisabet Sahtouris wrote:

Our intellectual heritage for thousands of years, most strongly developed in the past few hundred Our intellectual heritage for thousands of years, most strongly developed in the past few hundred years of science, has been to see ourselves as separate from the rest of nature, to convince ourselves we see it objectively -- at a distance from ourselves -- and to perceive, or at least model it, as a vast mechanism.

This objective mechanical worldview was founded in ancient Greece when philosophers divided into two schools of thought about the world. One school held that all nature, including humans, was alive and self-creative, ever making order from disorder. The other held that the `real' world could be known only through pure reason, not through direct experience, and was God's geometric creation, permanently mechanical and perfect behind our illusion of its disorder.

This mechanical/religious worldview superseded the older one of living nature to become the foundation of the whole Western worldview up to the present.

Philosophers such as Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Plato were thus the founding fathers of our mechanical worldview, though Galileo, Descartes, and other men of the Renaissance translated it into the scientific and technological enterprise that has dominated human experience ever since.

What if things had gone the other way? What if Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus, the organic philosophers who saw all the cosmos as alive, had won the day back in that ancient Greek debate?

What if Galileo, as he experimented with both telescope and microscope, had used the latter to seek evidence for Anaximander's theory of biological evolution here on Earth, rather than looking to the skies for confirmation of Aristarchus's celestial mechanics? In other words, what if modern science and our view of human society had evolved from organic biology rather than from mechanical physics?

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William Pritting's avatar

Explain who David Bohm was and his hypothesis that particles ride on pilot waves.

David Bohm (1917–1992) was an American-born theoretical physicist renowned for his contributions to quantum mechanics, plasma physics, and philosophy of science. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, he studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley, earning his PhD in 1943. 2 Bohm’s early career involved work on plasmas during World War II at the Manhattan Project’s radiation laboratory, but he faced significant personal and professional challenges, including being blacklisted during the McCarthy era for alleged communist sympathies, which led to his arrest in 1950 (though he was later acquitted) and eventual exile to Brazil, Israel, and eventually the UK, where he became a professor at Birkbeck College in London. 1 5 Beyond quantum theory, Bohm explored concepts like the “implicate order” in the universe, dialogue as a form of collective thinking, and collaborations with philosophers like Jiddu Krishnamurti, influencing fields from physics to consciousness studies. 2 He is often described as one of the 20th century’s most influential physicists despite his unconventional ideas facing resistance from mainstream quantum orthodoxy. 2

Bohm’s most famous contribution to quantum mechanics is his revival and development of the pilot wave theory, also known as Bohmian mechanics or the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation. 0 Originally proposed by French physicist Louis de Broglie in the 1920s as a way to reconcile wave-particle duality, the idea was largely abandoned until Bohm independently rediscovered and refined it in 1952 while working in Brazil. 6 7 8 In this hypothesis, quantum particles (like electrons) are not probabilistic entities as in the dominant Copenhagen interpretation, where particles exist in superpositions until measured. Instead, particles have definite positions and trajectories at all times, “riding” on a guiding or “pilot” wave described by the wave function (ψ) from Schrödinger’s equation. 0 1

The pilot wave is a real, physical field that permeates space and evolves deterministically, influencing the particle’s motion through a “quantum potential” that encodes information about the entire system. 4 6 This makes the theory nonlocal—changes in one part of the system can instantly affect distant particles via the wave function—explaining phenomena like entanglement without invoking observer-dependent collapse. 1 Bohmian mechanics reproduces all predictions of standard quantum mechanics but offers a more intuitive, deterministic ontology by treating particles as classical-like objects guided by the wave, much like a surfer rides an ocean wave. 0 However, it introduces “hidden variables” (the precise particle positions, unknown to observers), which Bohm argued resolve quantum paradoxes while maintaining realism. 6 Despite initial dismissal for being “too philosophical” or equivalent to other interpretations, it has gained renewed interest in recent decades for its potential in quantum computing, chaos theory, and experiments testing quantum foundations. 1 4

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