Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm

This is the first biography of David Bohm, brilliant physicist, explorer of consciousness, student of Oppenheimer, friend of Einstein, and enemy to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

In Infinite Potential, Peat describes how David Bohm came to believe that the traditional interpretation of quantum mechanics - with its barriers of uncertainty - was incomplete. In a bold step that turned quantum mechanics on its head, he introduced the "implicate order," which created a storm of controversy, yet may well have opened the door to a much deeper theory of the nature of reality.

In these pages, the general reader will obtain the first clear, non-mathematical explanation of Bohm's brilliant theory, which gave new hope of finding the elusive "hidden variables" theory, the missing piece of the quantum mechanics puzzle for which Albert Einstein had spent decades searching. As Peat shows, Einstein had such a high regard for Bohm and his work that he made Bohm his close collaborator and friend.

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But Bohm the scientist was also Bohm the courageous human being. Born in a small town in Pennsylvania, he began his career as an American physicist, but was forced to give up his U.S. citizenship and flee America's borders by "Tail Gunner Joe" McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunters.

This book captures the suspense of Bohm's steadfast refusal to bow before McCarthy's inquisitors and betray his colleagues, and the suffering he endured in his subsequent exile and years of wandering before he finally found sympathy for his plight and support for his theories at Birkbeck College in England.