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Much of the “conventional” view of quantum mechanics is summarized by the debates Bohr & Einstein had at the 1927 Solvay conference, centered on the idea that what makes quantum mechanics so odd is that particles can be at two places at once: and that if you see a particle emerge from an interferometer, “you cannot ask where it was before it got there.” Bohm’s picture gives the lie to this claim. Reproducing precisely all the predictions of quantum theory, he nevertheless offered a simple, visualizable description of particles following definite trajectories. Whether or not you believe this is the final description of “what is out there” (I’m not certain I do), you can no longer claim no such picture is possible!

As powerful as quantum theory is, thinkers like Bohm believed that its goal must also be to provide an underlying picture of “what is happening” in the real world, not merely to predict the results on laboratory measurement dials. These days, there are numerous approaches to
peering beyond the quantum formalism and trying to ask what it tells us about underlying reality, including “weak measurement,” a perspective I find especially powerful, and which was pioneered by Bohm’s Ph.D. student Yakir Aharonov.

Since 1926, it has been known, for instance, that quantum mechanics predicts that no matter how seemingly insurmountable a barrier, how high what we physicists call a “potential,” there is always some chance for a particle to appear on the other side. This still seems so magical to physicists that we call it “tunneling,” as though to signal that we know there was no way for the particle to climb this hill, and it is almost as though it had traversed some hidden “tunnel” underneath it. Yet this magic is of vast importance, occurring constantly in the nuclear processes that power the sun, but also in photosynthesis, in fast electronic switches, and in fancy magnetometers used for everything from basic research to brain scans. But for nearly a century, physicists skirted the question of “where” the particle was while traversing this tunnel, let alone how long it spent there. You just don’t ask that.

We have recently completed an experiment, using Aharonov’s ideas, in which we show that these questions shouldn’t be forbidden, and that one can get answers to them. I like to think Bohm would be thrilled. In the future, it may even be possible to show experimental traces of Bohm’s own trajectories for these tunneling particles. More and more, laboratory experiments can finally address the deep questions that occupied so much of Bohm’s thought, and probe not only where a system ends up, but what it’s doing on the way. I am optimistic that such studies bring us ever closer to a realization of Bohm’s dream of a unified understanding of reality.

— Aephraim M. Steinberg

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Bohm was recognised by his contemporaries and invited to the Shelter Island conference after World War II to discuss the future development of American theoretical physics. Amongst the group attending were Oppenheimer, Feynman, Schwinger, Wheeler and other greats of American theoretical physics. Bohm had pioneered the development of plasma physics; he had written a text book entitled “Quantum Theory” where he explained Bohr’s viewpoint. Later with Aharonov, Bohm clarified an unexpected quantum effect discovered by Ehrenberg and Siday. This effect became known as the AB effect and it today forms the basis of modern gauge theory. Bohm also showed that the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox could be described in terms of spin and thereby made the implications of quantum entanglement more apparent.

It was Bohm’s proposals for a new interpretation of quantum mechanics that engendered much opposition from the mainstream physics community. Bohm had taken a clue from an algebraic approach that appears in Dirac’s “The Principles of Quantum Mechanics” and extended it to all powers of Planck’s constant. This produced Bohm’s new interpretation where the notion of a particle with a local momentum following trajectories can still be maintained. The experimental predictions of Bohm’s approach agreed with the standard interpretation, but there appeared a new quality of energy, the quantum potential energy. Such an additional energy had already been noticed by de Broglie, Fermi and Feynman who called it ‘mysterious’; it had even been used by von Weizsäcker to obtain a better estimate of the Thomas-Fermi kinetic energy functional. The presence of this energy offered an explanation for the strange behaviour of the Bohm trajectories and also provided an explanation for quantum non-locality, but in an unwelcome way for many. Although the quantum potential energy emerged from the formalism, few were originally prepared to contemplate its existence. Heisenberg called the quantum potential energy ‘ad hoc’, even though it emerged from the Schrödinger equation, and claimed “Bohm was trying to prove 2+2=5”!

The problem was there seemed to be no way of directly observing the presence of this new quality of energy. However the introduction by Aharonov and Vaidman of the notion of weak values opened up the possibility of a way to observe the effects of the quantum potential experimentally.

Aephraim Steinberg and his team in Toronto were the first to show that momentum flow lines produced by photons had a remarkable similarity to the Bohm non-relativistic particle trajectories. A group at UCL involving Robert Flack and Peter Barker is at present doing new experiments using atoms to show similar effects. Atoms follow the Schrödinger equation from which the quantum potential energy arose in the first place. Using atoms therefore offers a more direct proof of the presence of this new quality of energy. We were almost there when our labs were closed down because of Covid-19. We are eager to return soon as we are now within sight of our goal.

— By Basil J. Hiley

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Fast reverse!

When I was very young, I attended the Cinema regularly.As soon as the lights went down and the projector beam hit the screen, I entered another reality. I completely lost any awareness of those around me and was drawn into the reality of the movie.

Often I wondered, as I walked home after such screenings, could the reality that I was witnessing in front of me be some kind of projection? This thought used to bother me a lot. My friends would often catch me spinning around at staggering speed to see if I could catch the un-seen projector hiding behind me. But no matter how I fast I turned, I never found it.

So I began to think that there may be a dimension of reality that lies beyond our sense perceptions which feeds into the reality of our everyday world. Could this be the unseen projector I was looking for?

Some years later, I was travelling in the cockpit of a Boeing 737 with my Father, an airline pilot. I was strapped into what they call the ‘jump’ seat just behind my Dad. The Destination, London Heathrow. The aircraft was experiencing turbulence, visibility was almost zero. There were cross winds of 80 mph and it was raining hard. We were descending rapidly. My eye was on the altimeter and I could see the rapid rate of decent.

Shortly before landing I said to the first officer “how do you know where we are?”––but it was my Dad who answered saying “count to 15 and you will see the runway directly in front of us”.

I counted to 15. And low and behold, there it was, the main runway at Heathrow all beautifully lit with the runway lights reflecting in the wet. Amazing!

So, I asked the question again “how did you know our position above the ground with nothing visible in sight”, and my Dad turned to me with a smile and said, “ye of little faith”….

Well actually, it had nothing to do with faith.  Certainly not faith in any kind of religious sense. It was a faith grounded in hard physics. Had my Dad tried to land that Boeing using only his sensory perceptions, the aircraft would have ended up strewn across some field far from its destination. The Aircraft landed safely through a human reliance on instruments which are rooted in the physics equations of Albert Einstein.

And so I came to another realization; we mis-perceive our world through our sense perceptions. We rely on something beyond our reality of space time to navigate our everyday world.

Again, I thought of the un-seen projector.

Fast forward! 

Then I saw 2001. A Space Odyssey.

Up there on the giant Cinema screen, the mysterious Universe spread out before me in all its vastness and splendor. The scientific impulse to find out more about our universe mixed with philosophical ideas about freewill, the ending of time, reincarnation, life beyond earth. Consciousness. Suddenly––all the colors seemed to run into one. One giant cosmic projector….

Fast forward again!

Italy 2012. A small medieval village.

I was alone in a small café bar. An elderly gentleman with a strong liverpudlian accent appeared beside me and ordered an espresso.

We chatted together for a while as we were the only two people in the village speaking English. His name was David Peat, a physicist. We became friendly.

When David Peat found out I was a film maker, he came to visit me at my house one day and asked me to read a couple of A4 sheets of paper with a title that read “Infinite Potential” – The life and ideas of David Bohm.

In that brief synopsis I read about the Implicate order/Explicate order, the Quantum Potential and non-locality. I was immediately drawn to the philosophical aspects. The idea that our apparent everyday world of space and time emerged from a deeper “dimension.” Also I was very attracted to the maverick intelligence behind what I read, Bohm himself.

Here was a clear explanation of that deeper dimension of reality, the unmanifest and formless, enfolding and unfolding into our manifest world of form, the mystery behind our perception of actuality…

This was it. I had indeed found that projector I was looking for.

That beam of light, emerging from the deeper cosmic reality behind all the dualities of our 3 dimensional world, in which humankind, both as actors and audience appear on the screen of manifest reality.

Once grasped, I was able to comprehend that deeper dimension where everything is interconnected, a full expression of wholeness. I came to KNOW that beyond the veil of form one can realise a ONENESS, present in you, me, the Universe and everything. I sensed that realm of BEING,  which is fully consistent with quantum theory. In that state of being, normally obscured by the mind, I began to believe that we are all ONE CONSCIOUSNESS, the immeasurable “Spirit” that Bohm says “is never born and never dies”…the profound realization that there is No dying, No death.

Bohm believed that nature has an infinite quality.

He merges INTO his physics, profound ideas which have been known for millennia by the mystical traditions of the east, a realization that the whole Universe is contained in each part of the universe and that all of time is contained in each and every passing moment. A wholeness that is held together by CONSCIOUSNES itself.

That was David Peat’s gift to me when we met in that Café Bar in Italy.

He introduced me to David Bohm – the visionary scientist and spiritual man.

— Paul Howard

(Director & Producer)

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I had heard Paul talking about the David Bohm Infinite Potential project for some time but honestly thought it would be a very difficult project to get financed. The ideas sounded wonderful and very inspiring, ideas about wholeness, oneness, emergence and  transformation that embraced  the notion of consciousness and what that might be. These are all ideas I have been personally very interested in for many years.

Then one day Paul called to say he had successfully got the documentary financed and asked me would I like to help him out with the edit. I jumped at the opportunity.

At the time I was producing content for a property management company in london but I wanted to work on Infinite Potential so I was in from the beginning and could also see that it was going to be quite a challenge to balance both the spiritual and science aspects of the project and to make them appealing to a general audience. Paul and I were at one in that we both felt we needed to create a deep sense of mystery from the beginning. How could we do this. I thought that the one experience people are always moved by is the mystery of the night sky. When people actually get to look at the night sky on a clear night they are filled with a kind of awe and respect for the mystery and magnitude of creation. We had some great footage of starry night skies and it just so happened that Paul had done an interview in which Bohm draws attention to that very mystery. Bohm believed that the so-called vast emptiness of deep space is not empty at all, but in actuality is vast fullness out of which space-time and our “apparent” reality emerges. I felt that would be a perfect opening…we both felt that would be a great place to start exploring Bohm’s very radical ideas….

Once we had a beginning, a point to launch the film’s narrative thrust, then I felt the rest would flow from there. I felt that the best route to travel was to try and build a narrative spine for the project through the great interviews that Paul had gathered together. So, we worked every day, distilling the core content of each interview on a theme by theme basis so that they cohered and would allow the story to unfold in a clear and accessible manner.

For me the finished project is truly amazing. It raises many very important questions that are so relevant for the uncertain times we live in. It also provides direction on how we might begin to answer those questions.

David Howard

Associate Producer & Co-Editor

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I’m very honored to be among a select group of creative people who had the chance to contribute to the film Infinite Potential. Filmmaking is teamwork and we had a lot of amazing people working very hard to allow this project to manifest itself.

As the cinematographer and one of the film’s editors, my primary contribution was to the visual language. My approach was to visualise the idea of “undivided wholeness” and come up with metaphoric montages that could do it justice. David Bohm referred to it as the “Implicate Order” enfolding into the “Explicate Order”––a notion he picked up from quantum mechanics and adapted into his own theory. Bohm hypothesized a new order to quantum physics in which all things are interconnected and they form a unity––a so-called underlying reality, which emerges through the act of conscious observation and becomes explicate.

It’s not visible and then, suddenly, it is.

I wanted to represent this miraculous transition––this moment between not being and being. An ephemeral state between mind and matter.

The attached image is an example of this concept of the Implicate Order––everything constantly unfolding into the Quantum Field and then enfolding into the now. This effect of a raised hand “enfolding” and blending into a field of wheat seemed like the perfect illustration of this concept.

I loved the challenge of translating a technical concept into “art”. For me, the way to understand complex realities is to try to simplify them. Inspiration also came from moments where I was truly present, observant of my surroundings––particularly in nature. When you start to look for patterns in the natural world, you start to see them all over, such as the fractals and spirals which appear everywhere.

David Bohm defined beauty as “searching for new patterns that are fitting in every sense.” In the process of working on this film I became deeply influenced by Bohm’s ideas. Questions about the nature of consciousness had occupied me since my teenage years. I grew up in a context that was strongly influenced by philosophy and literature. After high school I came in contact with the book “Tao of Physics” by Fritjof Capra, a bestseller from the 80s. This book turned my world upside down. It seemed that there was actual proof out there that our consciousness was interacting with the physical world. Are we all together simulating this so-called “reality” that seems so real?

It occurred to me that consciousness was not only a topic to be illuminated in philosophy, but it was essential that physics, too, recognized it as a phenomenon to be studied.

All this has helped me to develop a cinematographic language for Infinite Potential. David Bohm has impacted me so

much on this journey. Through this project I came in contact with a personality who took a completely new look at the world around him. He was aware that we cannot have coherent theories if we have a fragmentary approach. We must consider ideas from ancient history, philosophy, sociology, natural science and art––from both east and west––to get closer to the origin of reality and thus of our own being.

It seemed to me that the remarkably humble David Bohm had almost entirely sublimated his ego in order to dedicate himself entirely to the path of truth. Doing this in a world that was so strongly marked by competition and egoism was highly inspiring to me. He died almost exactly one year after I was born, so I never met him personally. But I can say that David Bohm has been one of the most influential people in my life.

Juliette Hüsler

Cinematographer & Co-Editor

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