Produced and Directed by Paul Howard; Imagine Films, 2020
Review by Bill Locke
Trailer (2:30 minutes):
I’m not exactly sure why I have been compelled to study the writings of David Bohm (1917–1992) for the past 10 years or so. He was an obscure figure in history, a physicist with unusual ideas. Maybe it’s because he devoted his life to uniting science and spirituality, taking a stance so revolutionary that many of his fellow scientists assumed it must be absurd. Perhaps he appealed to me because Einstein, a colleague and friend at Princeton, called David Bohm “my spiritual son”. Or maybe because HH the Dalai Lama counted upon Bohm as his scientific advisor. It could also be because Bohm was a brilliant thinker, who was prepared to disrupt the long-held paradigm that the universe was defined in a way that made sense.
Though gifted and fearless, those who knew Bohm well describe him as remaining humble, gentle and kind to the end of a tumultuous life. To this day, few know of Bohm or his ideas about physics, consciousness, or the fabric of life.
Infinite Potential: The Life and Ideas Of David Bohm is a new feature-length documentary by director and producer Paul Howard, who also appreciated this enigmatic figure and his great insights. The film pours over the dimensions of Bohm’s psyche and the parameters of his life, weaving in the deepest convictions that Bohm developed during his lifetime.
Bohm should be a household name, but he is not. Paul Howard discovered David Bohm in a chance meeting in the medieval village of Pari, Italy in 2012. Or rather, he discovered Dr. David Peat, an elderly gentleman from Liverpool, ordering an espresso in English at the local café. After chatting, Howard was invited to visit the gentleman at his house in the village, which is when he discovered that Dr. Peat was a physicist who had worked in England and Canada, and who was a friend and colleague of David Bohm. Howard also discovered that Dr. Peat was the author of over 20 books, including a biography of David Bohm called Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm…and thus the idea of making this documentary was born.
The film sets out to make sense of a maverick scientist who unsettled the scientific world with a wholly new way of looking at reality through the lens of physics, and somehow also through the lens of spirituality. I found it very exciting, and very moving as well. Perhaps it’s because David Bohm reminded me so much of my own dad.
Understanding a man from Bohm’s time is difficult. Like my father, Bohm was an American Jew. Both men grew up during the first half of the twentieth century, an unbridled era of historic turmoil. Both felt compelled to search for a scientific understanding of the universe. Both were unfailingly caring and generous, but always questioning. My father loved reading the latest issues of science magazines, and one of my early memories is of stacks of these magazines around our house.
David Bohm (left) and my father Gene Locke
Bohm worked and advocated for new thinking at a time of clashes between cultures and political ideologies, during five decades of scientific breakthroughs and quantum theories harnessed for devastating bombs.
In an attempt to understand and accept orthodox physics, Bohm wrote what was to become the standard textbook on quantum mechanics. But he came to the conclusion that physics, as it was then taught, was unable to explain reality.
Instead, Bohm took a new path. In some ways it was also an ancient, natural and organic view. He wrote that there are two complementary realities. In his words, there is an “explicate order” which is the reality that we commonly observe, and an “implicate order” which underlies everything. This concept of two interconnected and equally valid realities threatened the basis of quantum theory, which took a disjointed mechanical view. It also blocked the decades-old attempt by physicists to align quantum theory (the theory of the small) with cosmology (the theory of the large). As you would expect, Bohm’s writings triggered a thunderstorm of reactions among his fellow physicists.
Somehow, with a deft series of ideas, thought-experiments and equations, Bohm had come up with another perspective of the nature of reality, invoking another way to get our heads and our hearts around this great mystery. As Dr. Shantena Sabbadini, quantum physicist and philosopher, puts it in the documentary, Bohm provided the key to “the deepest, hidden level of reality, the gate of all wonder.”
Who would have expected such a powerful new way of thinking from a gentle young man who had grown up in a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania during the Depression? His father certainly didn’t. Bohm’s dad thought his son’s interest in science was simply an effort to live in a dream world, and was of little practical use. Fortunately, Ivy League universities thought otherwise. Bohm was given a scholarship and later studied under some of the greatest minds of his time.
His adult years included a time of persecution. This was in spite of the fact that Bohm made great strides in understanding quantum mechanics, preparing the way for harnessing the power of the sub-atomic world. Robert Oppenheimer was Bohm’s thesis supervisor who later went on to lead the Manhattan Project which developed the atomic bomb. Many say that Oppenheimer took advantage of Bohm’s work, while barring him from taking part in the Project. Others in the scientific community felt threatened by Bohm’s revolutionary ideas about reality and tried to discredit him.
The Anti-Communist harangue of Senator Joe McCarthy and his devotees also led to Bohm being persecuted. As a young man, he had become interested in the writings of the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, whose dialectical method was taken up by Karl Marx. This interest led Bohm to participate in a short-term affiliation with a Communist gathering, which many years later came to the attention of McCarthy. Bohm was essentially exiled from the U.S., and left for South America, later working in Israel and England.
From early in his academic life, Bohm had great potential. He saw, described and articulated the powerful nature of things, which he called Quantum Potential, the infinite power in the micro reality with its deep connections in the macro. Quantum Potential, in short, explains a lot of phenomenon in physics which we so far have not otherwise been able to explain. For example, quantum mechanics struggles with the fact that electron particles are hard to predict. They sometimes appear as waves, and when together seem to behave erratically. The most basic parts of matter and energy, we know, cannot be explained without understanding the whole. Non-locality is another phenomenon that is difficult to reconcile with current thinking. How can an object be in two places at the same time, or have an instantaneous effect on another that is far away without the two touching in any measurable way? Non-locality is about the interconnectedness of everything.
Bohm gave us a new and mind-bending way of looking at the universe – that it is contained in each part, and that all of time is contained in every passing moment. He intuited a wholeness, held together by consciousness itself. The documentary strives – and succeeds – to unpack these explanations, through interviews by an array of erudite scientists, philosophers and spiritual giants, such as H.H. the Dalai Lama, artist Sir Antony Gormley, Oxford Mathematician Sir Roger Penrose (who jointly won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for his research into black holes), and many more who were influenced by Bohm’s revolutionary work. The film is augmented by beautiful animations and an inspiring musical score by Filip Piskorzynski.
Producer/Director Paul Howard interviewing H.H. the Dalai Lama
Bohm felt strongly, and showed empirically, that we are not in fact separated from everything in the deepest realities at the sub-atomic level. The quantum reality, he said, with its finest of details, are part of a single system where separation does not exist.
As a spiritual man using science to gain understanding of deep mysteries, Bohm also lent us hope that our consciousness can be expanded. We know that there is a veil beyond which our limited human perceptions cannot see, that is difficult for us to even fathom with our intellect. Bohm taught and believed that there is a oneness, which when our consciousness is piqued, we can begin to appreciate.
These notions have long lain dormant to the Western world but they have persevered elsewhere, dominating Eastern philosophy for millennia. Judaic-Christian thinking rarely acknowledges these ideas or their sources, of wisdom traditions which have spoken of a mysterious fabric that informs all creation. In fact, mystics from many traditions – even Doctors of the Church – have described a similar timeless perspective.
Bohm connected with a widely divergent number of sources for understanding. A traditional Jew in many ways, he married an Israeli woman with deep spiritual roots. He also became good friends with Jiddu Krishnamurti, a mystic philosopher who spoke of suffering borne of human nature and the freedom that spiritual awareness brings. Though he came from a non-scientific perspective, Krishnamurti was fascinated by the connection between the “observer” and the “observed”, often called the “observer effect” in physics – the theory that the mere observation of a phenomenon inevitably changes it.
Bohm and Krishnamurti discussed this and other questions about reality and consciousness for decades. From two seemingly disparate backgrounds and perspectives, they strived to find a way to be conscious and aware of what is “seen as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete, but in a continuous process of enfolding and unfolding.”
Long after watching this documentary, I find myself still contemplating David Bohm’s ideas and his life story. Maybe, like my dad, I too am looking for answers. Many of the mysteries and questions which David Bohm pondered remain unanswered. And perhaps this is as it should be; perhaps there cannot be infinite potential without infinite questions.
Infinite Potential: The Life and Ideas of David Bohm is distributed by CounterPoint Films.
For more information on the making of the film, and how to watch it, visit www.infinitepotential.com or visit their Facebook page.
