David Bohm

A theoretical physicist who worked with Einstein at Princeton, contributed substantially to quantum mechanics — the Aharonov-Bohm effect, the de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave interpretation — and in his later career proposed that physics had been working on only the surface of reality.

Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980) is the load-bearing text. Bohm's argument: the manifest world studied by physics is an unfolded (explicate) projection from a deeper enfolded (implicate) order in which all things are interconnected at a level prior to spatial separation. Not metaphor. A serious physical proposal that consciousness and matter share that ground.

Bohm's later collaboration with the Indian teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti produced a series of recorded dialogues that read, to anyone familiar with both traditions, as Advaita meeting quantum mechanics. The two men were doing the same work in different vocabularies. Bohm was clear that he was not endorsing mysticism — but he was equally clear that the explicate-order separation of subject and object was an artifact of analysis, not the deeper structure.

His final years produced Thought as a System — an analysis of how conceptual thought generates its own problems when it loses awareness of its own self-referential operation. This is one of the few pieces of twentieth-century physics-adjacent writing that contemplative traditions immediately recognized as theirs. The book reads, in places, like a more rigorous version of what Krishnamurti had been pointing at for decades.

Bohm spent his final years McCarthy-exiled from American academic life — he was blacklisted in the early 1950s for refusing to testify against colleagues — and finished his career at Birkbeck College, London. His isolation from the American physics establishment may have been partly responsible for the depth of his cross-disciplinary work. Less surrounded by the Copenhagen consensus, he had more room to think.

Read together with Penrose-Hameroff for the contemporary quantum-consciousness proposal Bohm's work prefigured.