Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.MX

[music playing]

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

>> Unhappy in Brazil, Bohm traveled to Israel,

where he accepted a positionat the Technion in Haifa.

While in Israel, Bohm also met and married

the woman who was to become his lifelong partner, Sarah

Woolfson.

[music playing]

>> David had been exiled to Brazil after the House

Un-American Activities business.

And he was never happy there.

There were many problems, he felt.

And then he was offeredan opportunity in Israel.

And of course, it was a new state at the time.

And also, of course, he was Jewish.

Maybe he saw this as a good opportunity.

And he'd only been there a couple of weeks

when he was invited to a party.

And Saral was present.

And she spotted him from across the room

and immediately was interested in this young man.

I would describe Saral as a very motherly person.

She wanted to look after people.

She liked to feed people.

She was very sociable and including everyone.

>> My wife and I used togo to the public library.

And she discovered a book by Krishnamurti.

And she read in there the words of the observer

and the observed.

And I had been interested in that because, in quantum

mechanics, that is a key question, in the sense that,

because of this undivided wholeness,

the two cannot be separated.

>> And she opened the book,and in it immediately saw

references to things withregard to the observer

and the observed.

And she was startled because that's what David

was working with in physics.

And Saral is trying to understand how could this

be that this Indian philosopher is also

talking about the observer and the observed.

[music playing]

>> From Israel, Bohm moved to Bristol.

And it was here that his fundamental ideas

on the nature of reality began to take fresh impetus.

In Bristol, Bohm left hishidden variable ideas behind,

and was now focusing on the factthat, despite decades of work,

physicists had been unableto reconcile quantum theory

with Einstein's relativity.

>> He's left behind his hidden variables.

He's left that behind, and now he's

asking, why has there been decades of work

on relativity and quantum theory,

the two key theories ofphysics, why are there two?

Why is it not just one theory,one unified theory, as Einstein

had hoped there would be?

And so he's wondering, do we need a new theory?

Is that the core issue?

Or is a completely new order to physics, a new approach?

And that was what he began to think about, what

he called the implicate order.

We need a radically new order.

So that was where his thinking was when he arrived in Britain.

>> At this time, Bohm also developed a new interest that

was to have a deep impact on his life and his approach

to science.

As we have seen, quantum physics has long

been concerned with the process of wave function observation.

And Bohm was very much aware that, depending

on the conditions of an experiment,

that electrons would behave differently depending

on what was being observed.

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

that science would surely be a source of benefiting mankind.

And I had no question about it.

I began to feel that something beyond science

would be needed to approach this question,

you see, that science alone could not

guarantee that it would be used for benefiting mankind,

the scientific impulse.

In the beginning, I thought it would, just truth alone.

Then I began to look intophilosophy, Eastern and Western

and so on, and some peoplewith religious ideas.

I mean, just simply looking at it when I was in Bristol,

in England.

>> In quantum physics, in the study of the behavior

of the electron, you had this very mysterious property that

your act of observing the electron changes it in such

a way that there's a link between the apparatus

of observation and what is observed.

And Krishnamurti made a similar statement about events

in the psychological field, which

is that the act of observing something

inwardly, some emotion or some attitude or whatever,

the very seeing of it changes it,

so that the inward sense of an observer, myself, who's looking

is inextricably connected with whatever I'm looking at.

And so Krishnamurti expressed that

in sort of an aphoristic fashion,

by saying the observer is the observed.

>> Which, in essence, took the questions that David was

working with in physics and flipped them into the human

realm--

the realm of human experience, human life, human difficulties.

David felt that Krishnamurti was on to something

of great importance that could help

to complete the sense of wholeness

that he was trying to bring to light with his work in physics.

>> Krishnamurti's approachaligned with Bohm's own views

on the nature of thought, of reality,

and on the nature ofconsciousness, in particular,

seen as a coherent whole whichis never static or complete,

but a continuous processof enfolding and unfolding.

Both Bohm and Krishnamurti questioned

their respective backgrounds, ultimately rejecting

the orthodoxy they had once felt would provide answers

to humanity's big questions.

>> In his early life, he was kind of adopted by this

organization called the Theosophical Society,

which discovered him when he was a 14-year-old boy on the beach

in South India.

And they predicted that he was going

to become this great what they called world teacher,

and bring a new kind of consciousness to mankind.

And they cultivated him and nourished him in this role.

But somewhere about the age of 25, 27, maybe a little

bit earlier than that, he began to seriously question

all of this, and find it very limiting,

similarly to the way Bohm had found the scientific orthodoxy

to be limiting.

>> So Bohm wanted to meet this man.

And they had this meeting, and I'm told partway

through it Krishnamurti was supposed to have stood up

with pleasure or enthusiasm or whatever,

and said you have seen it, sir, so that Bohm had seen it.

And then Bohm began to have more meetings with Krishnamurti.

He became a trustee of Krishnamurti's school

at Brockwood Park.

[music playing]

>> It was at Brockwood Park that Bohm and Krishnamurti entered

into a series of conversations whose themes covered the ending

of time, the nature of mind, cosmic order,

and much more over a 25-year period.

>> And from Krishnamurti's perspective,

it was very important for him because he felt as though he

had a tremendous reservoir of insights to share with

the world, but he felt like he couldn't necessarily bring it

out by himself.

He needed people to ask him.

He needed people to dig and to question him.

And of all the people he evermet, Bohm was the best at that.

And I think Bohm, to some extent,

formed a similar function for Krishnamurti,

because Krishnamurti could raise questions with him that might

not occur in another context.

>> Grief is not my grief.

Grief is human.

>> Yes, now but how are to people to see that?

Because a person feeling grief feels

that it's his grief, you--

[chuckles] I mean, doesn't that seem right?

>> Yes, sir.

I think it is because partly of our education,

partly our society, tradition.

>> But it's also implicit in our whole way of thinking.

>> Yeah.

Oh, [inaudible].

Quite right.

So--

>> And we have to jump out of that.

>> Yes.

>> But perhaps we can see that love is not personal.

Love does not belong to anybody, any more

than any other quality does.

>> Earth is not English Earth or French Earth.

Earth is Earth.

>> You see?

And I was thinking of an example in physics

that, if a scientist or chemist is studying

an element such as sodium, it's not that he studies his sodium,

and somebody else studies his sodium,

and they somehow compare notes.

>> Quite, quite, quite.

Sodium is sodium.

>> Sodium is sodium universally.

>> Yes.

>> And if we have to say love is love universally, right?

Essentially, the point made by Krishnamurti

was that the problems of mankind originate

in thought itself, in consciousness itself, you see?

And as previous to that, I had grown up

believing that poverty was the main problem of mankind,

and science would help me eliminate that.

And I could see that no matter how far science went,

it probably wouldn't.

And even if it did, it wouldn't really

solve-- it wouldn't really make mankind happy.

>> I remember I once asked Bohm, I said, well,

what do you think, what's the main contribution

of Krishnamurti?

And if I remember it correctly, Bohm

said something like that Krishnamurti kind of pointed

out that thought is an actual movement in our lives.

It's a physical movement, physiological movement.

And it has a tremendous power.

It's behind almost all our problems.

>> And we have to give attention to that manner in which thought

is participating and shaping what we observe in order

to understand how our whole mind is working,

especially with respect to conflicts which occur between

you and me, between my country and another country,

and also the conflicts which occur inwardly.

>> And there, then, of course,Krishnamurti was suggesting

that, if you are able to be quiet,

the deeper layers of realitymight open up for you.

>> So in that state of mind, the mind is not just blank.

You know, I'm not doing anything.

It's very active.

The thinking process doesn't have

to do with thought or recognition or knowledge,

but it's in a state of just perception, awareness,

attention.

Maybe you could even say receptivity to truth.

>> There might have been many reasons Bohm was drawn

to Krishnamurti.

The ones that are apparent to me,

Bohm perceived the wholeness of life.

He perceived life as one indivisible whole,

including nature, including consciousness.

And in Krishnamurti, he found someone

who also had this notion.

>> Krishnamurti, who was actually addressing

the separation of the observerand the observed in the same

way as the wholeness inquantum theory was saying,

you can't make a separation between the system that

you're looking at and the apparatus,

which was the oldtraditional way of doing it,

that somehow these things formed a whole.

But rather than saying you can't develop concepts

for it, what David was trying to do was to develop concepts.

Now, to develop those concepts you

can't develop within the scientific context.

You've got to go outside to a wider set of concepts.

And he found in Krishnamurti a way

of discussing this more general question.

>> I remember one day we were here in Italy,

and he said to me, do you thinkI should give up doing physics

and just devote myself to Krishnamurti?

And my reply was kind of, fish exist

outside the goldfish bowl.

But that was it.

He was that extreme, that maybe he

should devote himself completely to having

his own brain transformed.

>> Having settled permanently in the UK,

it was while at Birkbeck College in London that Bohm formed one

of the most enduring science partnerships of his life with

physicist Basil Hiley.

And he also had an unexpectedand welcome encounter

with a forgotten theory.

And that encounter changed everything.

[music playing]

>> At that time, David Bohm wasdeveloping a new idea which was

called structured process, thatbasically we want to start with

process.

Not particles moving in spacetime,

but a process from which both particles and spacetime

can emerge.

Very radical ideas.

Chris Dewdney and ChrisPhillipidis came up to me

and said, why don't youtalk about the '52 paper?

And that's when I said, mm, uh, mm,

uh, because I think it's wrong.

And that's when Chris said to me, Basil,

have you read the paper?

And I then had to agree that I hadn't.

>> It had been decades since the physics orthodoxy had

blackballed Bohm and his hidden variables.

It would take a new team of mavericks

to unearth this critical work and resurrect it

for a new generation.

>> Well, I got to know David Bohm quite well when I was

a lecturer at Birkbeck College.

We had many very interesting discussions,

and Bohm was somebody who I got a lot from.

I always thought that he wasvery much like a wave function

himself, that you'd ask a question,

you see, a very specific question.

And he would be very focused and give you a deep, very focused

answer to that question.

And then it would start to spread out,

and it would encompass a little more about physics,

and then it spread, and then about philology,

and about human nature, and so on.

And I'd get a bit lost about what's going on,

so I'd need another question.

I'd ask him another question, and then woomph.

The conversation would focus itself very deeply

on this particular point.

And he would give a very succinct answer to that,

and then again he would spread out like this.

So it's just the way a wave functions as you measure it,

it's the particle here.

And woomph, you see?

And then it spreads out again, like this.

>> They'd finally developed sufficient computing power

needed to run the complex mathematics required

to describe Bohm's hidden variables.

>> I think it'd be a veryvaluable thing if we could show

clearly how Bohm's '52 theoryworked in the two slits

experiment, because obviously,the two slits experiment is

the iconic experiment in theinterpretation of quantum

theory.

And so Basil went off and read the papers.

I set about calculating the particle trajectories for this.

And Chris Phillipidis produced the quantum potential picture.

>> And that's what Chris was an absolute master at, was

actually developing computer programs to actually simulate

this, and let's have a look at what is going on here.

>> When we put the two together, I mean,

we were initially I think quite staggered by how amazing this

story was, which had never been told in any sort of clear,

detailed way.

>> And there was a trajectory for the two slits experiment.

Wow.

>> You could actually see in the images that reproduced exactly

how you could have particle trajectories in the two slits

experiment and account for interference, something,

of course, which is forbidden in normal quantum theory.

[music playing]

You could actually see how the thing worked exactly.

You could follow individual particles

as it was affected by this potential through space,

and consequentially would guide particles

into the bright interference fringes.

>> Wherever there was a dipin the quantum potential--

that's the rate of change of apotential, which is a force--

and the trajectories wouldjump across the ditch.

And when they were on the plateaus,

they would just come straight.

And the end result was a gathering

of these trajectories which explained completely

the interference pattern.

>> There was a physicist, Franco Selleri,

who was particularly supportive of this work once he'd learned

about it.

And he referred to these movies as the hard porn of physics,

in a sense, because they would be censored by the orthodoxy.

You shouldn't be able to see this stuff,

and yet here we were projecting it in front of them.

>> At that stage, when Dave was still alive,

he saw these trajectories and this quantum potential,

and his eyes actually lit up because he had not seen them.

He'd written about them, but he had not seen them.

And then we started discussing the quantum potential,

what could it mean.

And this quantum potential energy

only functions when quantum phenomena appear.

That is, in the particle approaching two slits,

it is the quantum potential that organizes

the way the individual trajectories work.

So there is a dynamic whole process

going on in which the quantum potential appears.

>> If you're looking at interpretations or ways

of looking at quantum mechanics,my view is that probably

the Bohm-Hiley way of looking atquantum mechanics has the most

satisfactory ontology.

So you have a picture of what constitutes reality

without changing quantum mechanics.

[music playing]

>> The Bohmian theory made a clear prediction about

the nonlocality of the world.

What is nonlocality?

Nonlocality is really, to put it in simple words,

the profound discovery of the interconnectedness

of the universe at the fundamental level of quantum.

Now, that conflicts deeply right away with relativity theory,

where it says, no, the speed of light is limited.

Everything is local.

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light,

so how could everything be instantaneously

interconnected in the universe?

And that's the big clash that we have today.

And that's why also Bohm's theory of hidden variables,

which are nonlocal, has really been rejected from the start.

>> It seems strange to us.

And I stress the word seems.

But if we want to make senseof a theory, that matters also.

And sometimes when a theory seems strange, we get past it.

And other times when it seems strange,

it's pointing us to something that we

haven't understood well enough.

>> It really says that there exists a hidden regime

of reality in which everything is interconnected,

but no person, even in the future,

will be able to access that domain and control it.

So this is also what the mystical traditions

tell us, that we must be humble in front of reality,

that there will always be domains of reality that

will remain beyond science, beyond the scientific method,

will remain beyond access by scientific agents.

And if the quantum potential is discovered in this way

and nonlocality is proven, then the existence of that domain

is proven.

>> Remember, we're talking about wholeness.

We have to have wholeness in here.

Here, we agree with Bohm.

Bohm pointed out that it was very important the new feature

that quantum mechanics introduces is a kind

of wholeness, which means we cannot analyze things

by cutting them up into little bits as we do in classical

physics.

But what we can do is, if we want to try and cut it up,

that the way one bit goes into the next bit

actually involves unfolding into the whole

and then enfolding back again into a particular region.

And so you get this idea of unfolding, enfolding,

unfolding, enfolding.

So what looks like a continuoustrajectory is actually a series

of foldings and unfoldings.

[music playing]

>> I tried to get some idea ofwhat might be the process which

was implied by the mathematicsof the quantum theory.

And this process is what I call enfoldment,

that the mathematics itself suggests

a movement in which everything in which

any particular element of space may

have a field which unfolds into the whole,

and the whole enfolds into it.

[music playing]

>> What David and I have done is to open up the discussion,

which I find, when I'm talking to young people,

that they're very interested in trying to proceed further with

these ideas.

In other words, some of them have actually

got it, as I put it.

They know in their basic feelings

that this is an interesting way to go.

>> The lab at University College London is at the center

of experiments to prove the existence of the quantum

potential.

>> If the quantum potential exists in this way,

then that really is the first evidence for the profound

interconnectedness of the physical universe at a very

deep, fundamental level.

That would revolutionize our scientific worldview.

It would validate those views of unification,

those views that speak to the wholism of the universe.

And it truly would be a confirmation

of a kind of wholism that religions and spiritual systems

and mystical systems have intuited for many centuries,

and millennia, even.

>> So what does all this mean for you, for me, the universe,

and everything?

Bohm suggests that, out of perceived emptiness, out

of the so-called vacuum state, particles interact with,

respond to, and are informed by an information potential which

allows the cosmos to emerge.

>> So it's the informationinforming action of the quantum

potential that makes it possiblefor the physical universe

to be.

>> Everything we know andeverything we will come to know

is already information waitingto unfold into manifest

reality.

It's the implicate waiting to become explicate.

[music playing]

>> We aren't just things in space.

We are places of transformation.

And furthermore, our relationship with others,

but with all phenomena, is very much

a question of our relative positions.

And I think that was something else that really deeply

affected me about Bohm's work, the participant

nature of the observer in the emerging of what

we call reality.

The way that Quantum Cloud works is

that you are thedeterminer of what you see.

This is a mess of I think elements

that are both particlesand, hopefully, trajectories

that come together.

And depending on where yourposition is, either in a boat

or walking along the side of the Thames,

and depending on the time of day,

you will see or not seethe possibility of a body.

Quantum physics invites us to be participators in that emerging

of a world.

And it has very, very fundamental,

I think, both philosophical, spiritual,

and political implications, which are essentially

that each of us is a co-producer of a world, that each of us

is a co-producer of a possible future.

The work of people like Einstein and Bohm,

they are like huge windows opening in the imagination

to a way of dealing with life and the things

we encounter within it freshly and, in a sense,

with the right level of uncertainty.

>> The present ego identity is based, I think,

on a wrong mode of thought, you see,

in which a person identifies with his thoughts and with his

body and with things, you see, which means that he's creating

an illusion, that this self which people feel they have is

only a show.

It's not really there.

But it is such a convincing show that everybody

acts as if it were there, and that

gives it an apparent reality.

One of the most essential points of the scientific spirit

is to acknowledge the fact, or the interpretation of the fact,

whether you like it or not, that is not

to engage in wishful thinking or not to reject something

because you don't like it.

>> Is it possible scientifically to define this wholeness?

>> Well, not really.

Wholeness is an attitude or an approach, but it can be,

given a scientific realization, you see--

>> I think two levels, interdependency.

Firstly, external things, different nations,

different country, environment, and human beings,

other animals.

Everything interdependent.

So now, according to that reality,

we have to take care about the whole world and environment.

>> We are internally related to everything,

not externally related.

Consciousness is an internal relationship to the whole.

We take in the whole and we act toward the whole.

And that, in turn, whatever we have taken in

determines, basically, what we are.

>> When we pass through some sort of forest, no bird,

we feel something missing.

When we're passing through some birds singing,

some birds flying, then we feel more full.

So that's now the reality.

So interdependency on that level.

[music playing]

>> Bohm's model of the implicateand explicate I think is

talking about how the subject/object split,

duality emerges from a ground,which Lao Tzu would call

the Dao, which is non-subject,non-object, but a unity,

a wholeness.

>> Ancient Indians only used mind or wisdom,

and sometimes meditation.

No instrument.

No modern science.

Use instrument.

>> Science is whatever people make of it.

You see, science has changed over the ages,

and it's different now from a few hundred years ago,

and it could be different again.

Now, there's no intrinsic reasonwhy science must necessarily

be measurement.

This is another historical development

which has come about over the past few centuries.

It's entirely contingent, and not absolutely necessary.

>> So far, we know this much.

Still limitless the reality we have to sort of investigate.

So David Bohm, I think, really something like open our mind.

So grateful.

[music playing]

>> In all the areas that he worked in, he was constantly

pushing, pushing, pushing.

In physics, in dialogue, in consciousness.

>> He became a scientist, I believe,

in order to benefit humanity.

I think his mission was always leading up

to a transformation for human society,

overcoming the fragmentation that we experience

towards having the experience of a new interconnectedness

among us all to solve problems together,

overcoming the divisions.

So in that sense, he represented a truly holistic,

integrated vision of a human being.

And I think as that, he can serve as a model

for future generations.

>> It's a revolution.

It has radical implication about how we live our life,

how we interact with the Earth, how

we interact with each other.

And that revolution is unfinished.

[music playing]

>> If we aspire to go beyond ourpresent state of consciousness,

if we truly want to be happier,to love and know ourselves

better, to regain meaning and wholeness,

the old disciplines onlyserve to deepen the illusion

of manifest reality.

We must look beyond the veil of form

to a realization of oneness present in you, in me,

the universe, and everything.

When you grasp, this it will put you

on the threshold of what is real and your place in reality.

Reality is wholeness, undivided wholeness.

And this fact has yet to dawn on billions of people.

[music playing]