Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm - Softcover

Peat, F David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201328208 ISBN 13: 9780201328202

Publisher: Basic Books, 1997

Synopsis

Infinite Potential is the first biography of David Bohm brilliant physicist, explorer of consciousness, student of Oppenheimer, friend to Einstein, and enemy of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Although he battled bouts of crippling depression, Bohm proved to be one of the twentieth century's most original thinkers, influencing the fields of physics, philosophy, psychology, language, and education. In this compelling narrative, David Peat explains Bohm's life and landmark scientific work, including his famous ”hidden variables” causal interpretation of quantum mechanics, which created a storm of controversy, yet may well be the only theory that describes the true nature of reality.

About this title

About the Author:

F. David Peat, renowned author of many general books on science—including, with David Bohm, Science, Order & Creativity—was a friend and colleague of David Bohm for more than twenty years.

From Publishers Weekly:

Dismissed by establishment scientists as a maverick or mystical rebel, American physicist David Bohm (1917-1992) sought a holistic physics, a unified vision of matter and mind, brain and consciousness. His search for an alternative quantum theory led him to formulate a cosmology depicting a universe of infinite levels, each qualitatively different yet part of an interconnected whole. In this brilliant intellectual biography, science writer Peat, Bohm's longtime friend and colleague, portrays an intensely cerebral man gripped by periods of crippling depression, who had an acute need of a guru or father figure, whether mentor J. Robert Oppenheimer or Indian philosopher/ teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, and who ultimately felt betrayed by each of them. Born in Pennsylvania to a Hungarian Jewish immigrant father and a manic-depressive mother of Lithuanian Jewish extraction, Bohm, who settled in London in the late 1950s, was a disillusioned Marxist thinker (he briefly joined the U.S. Communist Party in 1942) who bravely refused to name names to a Congressional witchhunt committee when called to testify in 1949. Peat's probing exploration of Bohm's quest for an "implicate order," a deeper reality beneath the surface appearance of things, helps explain his influence on writers, artists, psychologists and philosophers as well as open-minded physicists.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0201328208
• ISBN 13: 9780201328202
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 357