Bohm and Implicate Order
Evgenii Rudnyi
Thanks for mentioning in your lecture the Bohm's book. I am not sure if
I understand what models finally he suggests using, but it was quite
good reading.
Interestingly enough, the rating of Bohm's book on Amazon (#41,821) is
much higher than that of Laughlin's book. I would expect that a book
with good anecdotes should have a better rank but it seems not to be the
case.
A small comment. Bohm assumes a linear development of science: the
celestial matter in the ancient times, Newton, modern science. It might
be that such a view is actually wrong. Recently I have read a book
Lucio Russo, The Forgotten Revolution, How Science Was Born in 300 BC
and Why it Had to Be Reborn
The author claims that during 200-300 hundred years after Alexander the
Great the science has reached a very high level that was again reached
only after more than thousand and half years. See for example a review
http://www.ams.org/notices/199805/review-graffi.pdf
or the the article in Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucio_Russo
In the Russo's book there also some nice comments about quantum mechanics:
"The departure of physics from the ancient scientific method started at
the turn of the twentieth century, when an enormous increase in the
range of observed phenomena demanded the creation of new scientific
theories, toward which no light could come from reading Archimedes nor
yet from browsing through all of Plutarch."
"Instead of proposing a third scientific theory, scientists such as de
Broglie and Bohr postulated 'particle-wave duality' and the
'complementary principle'. Faced with the inappriority of two mutually
incompatible theories, a culture that still confused theoretical
entities with real objects found it normal to attribute the nature
inconsistency of science itself."
"And perhaps, too, when the Pythagorean school ran into an impasse in
classifying the diagonal of the square, someone resorted to Eastern
teachings and the inherently contradictory nature of the world, and
proposed a solution: to declare the diagonal a profoundly ambiguous
entity featuring a duality or complementary between even and odd."
Best wishes,
Evgenii