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Introduction: Living Through Cold War Storms, Attempting to Understand the Quantum

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Abstract

Biographies are usually of interest because we may learn from them about the life of a person, their singularities in the plethora of humankind, as well as about the times in which the person lived. This is the case of David Joseph Bohm, a physicist who was born in the US, in 1917, educated there, lived in Brazil, Israel and the UK where he passed away in 1992. He was an outstanding theoretical physicist with achievements in standard science and breakthroughs in the way we obtain predictions and interpret the most successful physical theory, the quantum theory.

When I went to work with J. Robert Oppenheimer, I found a more congenial spirit in his group. For example, I was introduced to the work of Niels Bohr and this stimulated my interest, especially in the whole question of the oneness of the observer and the observed. […] I can still recall the many discussions I had on matters like this which had the effect of setting me on the course I’m still following today.

David Bohm, in Bohm and Peat, Science, Order and Creativity, 1987

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Bohm (1952).

  2. 2.

    Freire Junior (2015a).

  3. 3.

    Aharonov and Bohm (1959).

  4. 4.

    Philippidis, Dewdney et al. (1979); Bohm and Hiley (1993).

  5. 5.

    I coined the term quantum dissidents in 2009 (Freire Junior 2009). Ten years later, regressive trends in many parts of the world and market pressures on researchers suggest taking the “medium term” with a grain of salt as progressive accomplishments are never assured forever.

  6. 6.

    The Festschrift is (Bohm et al. 1987) and the textbook is Bohm (1951). Phillips letter is quoted in (Freire Junior 2015a, p. 63).

  7. 7.

    Bell (1982 and 1987).

  8. 8.

    Kojevnikov (2002), Forstner (2008), Freire Junior (2015a).

  9. 9.

    On biographies in the history of Science, see Kragh (1987). Söderqvist (1996, 46).

  10. 10.

    Dosse (2010). Westfall (1980). Le Goff’s citations are in the introduction of Le Goff (2009).

  11. 11.

    All citations of Le Goff are in the introduction of his Saint Louis’ biography (Le Goff, 2009), particularly on pages xxv, xxxi–xxxii.

  12. 12.

    Freire Junior (2015a). A short presentation of the book’s argument is Freire Junior (2015b). Forman (1971) and Jammer (1974).

  13. 13.

    It would be beyond the scope of this chapter to comprehensively identify the literature I looked to for support to understand those contexts. A summary list includes: on the Cold War and twentieth century history, Gaddis (2005), Westad (2017), Hobsbawm (1995 and 2002), and Judt (2005); on McCarthyism, Schrecker (1986 and 2002) and Wang (1999); on Marxism, (Hobsbawm 1991 and 2011), Ory and Sirinelli (2004), and Caute (1967); on Krishnamurti and Bohm, (Moody 2017).

  14. 14.

    On the intellectual history and the history of physics, see Seth (2011) and Badino (2016). See also Staley (2013) and the editorial, written by Peter Galison and Andrew Warwick, to the special issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics [29(3), 1998], titled “Cultures of Theory”. On the transnational approach to the history of science, see John Krige (2019). In this last book our contribution (Freire Junior and Silva 2019) exploits the case of David Bohm concerning his move from the US to Brazil.

  15. 15.

    Peat (1997, pp. 168–170). Bell (1964 and 1966). Bohm and Hiley (1975). Peat (1997, p. 170). For a detailed discussion of the appearance of Bell’s theorem and its early experiments, see (Freire Junior, 2015a), in particular Chap. 7.

  16. 16.

    Goldstein (1997). Kojevnikov (1998). Cushing (1997).

  17. 17.

    Pinch (1977). Cushing (1994). Olwell (1999). Mullet (2008a and b). Kojevnikov (2002). Freire Junior (1999, 2005 and 2011). Cross (1991). Forstner (2008). Pylkkänen (2007) and Bohm et al. (1999). Kožnjak (2018). Talbot (2017). Carvalho (2015), Petrônio (2013).

  18. 18.

    Wilkins (2003, 82). For the catalogue of Maurice Wilkins Papers, deposited at King’s College, London, see: http://www.kingscollections.org/catalogues/kclca/collection/w/wilkins-maurice/. See, in particular, the following references: “K/PP178/12/26/1-23 Papers, 1965–1999, relating to the writings of quantum physicist and philosopher David Joseph Bohm (1917–1992)”

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Acknowledgements

I have been working on Bohm’s ideas since my Ph.D., obtained in 1995 at the University of São Paulo under the supervision of Michel Paty and Shozo Motoyama. My doctoral dissertation was dedicated to the analysis of Bohm’s interpretation of quantum theory and its reception in the 1950s. Most of my time since then I have worked on the research which led to the book, The Quantum Dissidents , where Bohm was a major player. Thus, it is hard to list all the people and institutions I am grateful to for their support which resulted in this biography. While risking omissions, I would like to mention a few, in addition to those in the previous paragraphs. For the last sprint in the work on this biography, I obtained a leave of absence from my university, the Universidade Federal da Bahia, in Brazil. I am particularly grateful to João Carlos Salles, the president of the university, for understanding my need for leave of absence from my duties so as to finish this book. I spent this time at the American Institute of Physics, in its Center for History of Physics and Niels Bohr Library and Archives, in College Park, MD, in Washington, DC, area. I am thankful to its staff and particularly to Gregory Good, its director, and Stephanie Jankowski. During this time this study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior—Brasil (CAPES)—Finance Code 001 and the research was supported by the CNPQ [Grant 443335/2015-0]. I am grateful to Alex Wellerstein, for reading and commenting on Chaps. 2 and 3; Chris Talbot, for a careful reading of the full manuscript; Adam Becker, for sharing with me information about Bohm’s FBI files, which he obtained through a FOIA request; Gustavo Rocha and Mirella Vieira, for discussions on Krishnamurti; my colleagues and students at the Laboratory Science as Culture [LACIC, Portuguese acronym], for discussion on biographies in the history of science; Cory Fischer, from the Krishnamurti Foundation; Amit Hagar, Amiram Ron, Gil Lainer, Yvette Gershon, Elaine Fletcher, Michael Liss and Nel Ben Ami, for obtaining documents and testimonies from Bohm’s times at Technion and translation from the Hebrew; the Physics Institute at the Universidade de São Paulo and Ivã Gurgel, for the invitation to present a preliminary result of this book; Denise Sara Key, for her enduring support in the English revision; Angela Lahee for the suggestion and careful revision of the book proposal, as well as for her tolerance with my delays; Victoria Florio, for our conversation about science fiction magazines; Ricardo Zorzetto, for questions concerning the book; Italo Carvalho, for helping me with the graphs concerning scientometry; Thiago Hartz and Christian Joas, for their comments on a talk at the 25th International Congress of History of Science, held in Rio de Janeiro, 2017, which was an earlier version of Chap. 8; Monique Grimord, for discussions about the Pennsylvania mining towns; Chris Talbot, for several discussions on Bohm’s work; Inés Cortazzo and Sonia Cabeda, for informal discussions about this project. My journey to Wilkes-Barre was easier thanks to the support of Peter Grimord, who also took some of the pictures over there; Agnes Soares, who explained the role of the Yearbook as source of information concerning American high schools, and Colleen Robatin and Patrick Peter, principals at the GAR Memorial Junior Senior High School. While I am thankful for all comments from these colleagues, undoubtedly however, faults in the final version of the manuscript are my entire responsibility.

I am also indebted to my sisters, Fatima, Inês and Silvana, and my son, Vitor, for their moral support; and Agnes Soares for her lovely and kind support and interest in this work.

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    Olival Freire Junior

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Freire Junior, O. (2019). Introduction: Living Through Cold War Storms, Attempting to Understand the Quantum. In: David Bohm. Springer Biographies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22715-9_1

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