Imagine Bell's surprise, therefore, when a year or two later he read a pair of articles in the Physical Review by the American physicist David Bohm. Bohm had submitted the papers from his teaching post at Princeton University in July 1951; by the time they appeared in print six months later, he had landed in São Paolo, Brazil, following his hounding by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Bohm had been a graduate student under J. Robert Oppenheimer at Berkeley in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Along with several like-minded friends, he had participated in free-wheeling discussion groups about politics, worldly affairs, and local issues like whether workers at the university's laboratory should be unionized. He even joined the local branch of the Communist Party out of curiosity, but he found the discussions so boring and ineffectual that he quit a short time later. Such discussions might have seemed innocuous during ordinary times, but investigators from the Military Intelligence Division thought otherwise once the United States entered World War II, and Bohm and his discussion buddies started working on the earliest phases of the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. Military intelligence officers kept the discussion groups under top-secret surveillance, and in the investigators' eyes the line between curious discussion group and Communist cell tended to blur. When later called to testify before HUAC, Bohm pleaded the Fifth Amendment rather than name names. Over the physics department's objections, Princeton's administration let his tenure-track contract lapse rather than reappoint him. At the center of a whirling media spectacle, Bohm found all other domestic options closed off. Reluctantly, he decamped for Brazil.
In the midst of the Sturm und Drang, Bohm crafted his own hidden variables interpretation of quantum mechanics. As Bell later reminisced, he had "seen the impossible done" in these papers by Bohm. Starting from the usual Schrödinger equation, but rewriting it in a novel way, Bohm demonstrated that the formalism need not be interpreted only in terms of probabilities. An electron, for example, might behave much like a bullet or billiard ball, following a path through space and time with well-defined values of position and momentum every step of the way. Given the electron's initial position and momentum and the forces acting on it, its future behavior would be fully determined, just like the case of the trusty billiard ball—although Bohm did have to introduce a new "quantum potential" or force field that had no analogue in classical physics. In Bohm's model, the quantum weirdness that had so captivated Bohr, Heisenberg, and the rest—and that had so upset young Bell, when parroted by his teachers—arose because certain variables, such as the electron's initial position, could never be specified precisely: efforts to measure the initial position would inevitably disturb the system. Thus physicists could not glean sufficient knowledge of all the relevant variables required to calculate a quantum object's path. The troubling probabilities of quantum mechanics, Bohm posited, sprang from averaging over the real-but-hidden variables. Where Bohr and his acolytes had claimed that electrons simply did not possess complete sets of definite properties, Bohm argued that they did—but, as a practical matter, some remained hidden from view.
Bohm's papers fired Bell's imagination. Soon after discovering them, Bell gave a talk on Bohm's papers to the Theory Division at Harwell. Most of his listeners sat in stunned (or perhaps just bored) silence: why was this young physicist wasting their time on such philosophical drivel? Didn't he have any real work to do? One member of the audience, however, grew animated: Austrian émigré Franz Mandl. Mandl, who knew both German and von Neumann's classic study, interrupted several times; the two continued their intense arguments well after the seminar had ended. Together they began to reexamine von Neumann's no-hidden-variables proof, on and off when time allowed, until they each went their separate ways. Mandl left Harwell in 1958; Bell, dissatisfied with the direction in which the laboratory seemed to be heading, left two years later.
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11 Comments
Add CommentFor anyone who was interested in physics/cosmology in the 60s/70s this book is a fun read that will spark a lot of memories/nostalgia, and add a lot of background information on what was happening behind the headlines.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne reason I did not complete ROTC was because commanding officers told me the prime objective was to stop communism. Not pro or con towards communism, I wondered why the communist party was not allowed an equal voice to the democrats or republicans.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA wonderful and thoroughly enjoyable article--thank you! I totally want to get the book.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGood point. I probably would have dropped out if the war was against the democrats or republicans also.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMaybe it's because they would kill both party's off and rule the roust as King.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou have to step over the rotting corpses of seventy million people in order toget to Communism's justification. There is a reason Communism fell in the late eighties; it outlawed freedom.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNonsense. Communism the ideology had no more to do with those corpses than democracy the ideology was responsible for the deaths in Vietnam (you can look directly to corrupt US leaders for that particular death toll.) Those 70 million corpses were the result of NOT doing communism as the ideology specified, and almost entirely a consequence of being ruled by a series of bloodthirsty, paranoid, power-mad, corrupt dictators -- communist in name only -- who shoveled their caca downhill through a thoroughly corrupt power structure which again, was about as "communist" as you are.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou'll notice communism hasn't produced a mass of corpses in the USA, though there are quite a few communists, and communist-leaning folks around. You might ask yourself why.
I'm not saying communism is any great shakes, but it isn't a formula for murder, either. Certainly no more so than democracy or a republic. It's all about responsible, restrained leadership.
Everywhere Communism was attempted in the twentieth century, mass murder ensued. "Doing" communism as specified involves a universal cooperative effort on the part of its adherents. In other words "to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Bourgeoisie, perfectly happy with the status quo wasn't the least bit interested in giving up power or wealth to become "equal" with the working class, and even Marx and Engels new that world wide bloody revolution was necessary to bring about the "workers Utopia". Lenin was a paranoid psychotic, but he was the perfect man to carry out the revolution. Indeed, as evidence for what I say, ask yourself this question:
Where in the history of Communism was there NOT the bloodthirsty Dictator you describe?
Think about that question for a minute; How could it be that every single Communist society in the twentieth Century was a bloody dictatorship? How could it be that there was not one place on earth during the entire century where Communism flourished peacefully and more important, abundantly for all of its citizens?
How else to realize the Socialist dream? How else do you get to full cooperation with this ideology?
The Communist Revolution failed not as a consequence of being ruled by a series of "bloodthirsty, paranoid, power-mad, corrupt dictators"; they were absolutely what the revolution called for in its infancy. The revolution failed precisely because they couldn't kill or imprison apostates fast enough.
Fyngyrz, I'm assuming you are of the impression that if we just tried it one more time, and did it correctly, we'll all be farting bluebirds and singing Kum Bye Ya in no time. Well, we won't.
I agree. I think the problem was that Communism explicitly excluded democracy, and therefore there was never any accountability. Bloodthirsty dictators never had to win an election. Same with incompetent governors, mayors, Party leaders, and garbage collectors. I personally think that the main reason democracy is successful is not that it allow the "best" people to get elected, but that it allows people to "fire" the abusive ones. It permits accountability, or in other words, a negative feedback loop in which an abuse of power results in the removal of power. Communism has a positive feedback loop, in which the worse the abuse of power, the more power the abuser acquires.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you have a tube full of a non-compressible liquid, and you start entering more liquid in the tube in one of its ends, the liquid you entroduce in the origin of the tube will take a measurable time to go from one end of the tube to the other end, but flow transmission, i.e. movement of liquid along the whole tube, would be instantaneous. Does this fact have any connection to "Spooky action at distance" ?. I'm not trying to resuscitate the concept of "ether", naturally. Salut +
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell, when it comes to Hippies they all look alike to me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCERN's neutrinos exceeding the speed of light @ v-c/c=2.48 sec in 453.6 miles is an exact match to Stanford's SLAC E158 weak force asymmetry value showing the cause of 2.48e-5 is not the politics of a "loose fiber optic cable" checked countless times with the same "gain in space" shown by FERMI Lab's neutrinos supporting an observation that goes back to 1947 and is summed up in 2007 by G. Nimtz and A. A. Stahlhofen who believe it occurs outside the bounds of SR [arXiv:0708.0681v1] not aware of the simple explanation I showed E158 data provides with direct proof provided by SLAC's E158 data exposing a gain in time/space in 453.6 miles also @ 2.48e-5 with a .20 harmonic comma as I predicted for the asymmetry in the reverse arrow/phase of time the calculations reveal changing physics. SLAC's data comes from the distance light travels in 1000 years at the speed of light in a ratio to a 1 hour SOL gain making this comparative measurement the most spectacular ever made in physics and does so in regard to the most important observation in the History of Man.
This means E=m+{a}c2 outside the weak force where E=mc2 as that equation does not include the photon's force carrier space the neutrino provides to exit the weak force to create the strong force. This changes physics far more that E=mc2 did due to the infrastructure in place to take advantage of the energy tap {a} provides. It puts us back in sync with Newton's time but armed with E=mc2 corrected as well as Newton's law by adding the second reverse phase held by "imaginary" numbers in physics that never add up correct without {a} added to expose the second "real" reverse phase in time. And One more thing it shows, we live in a world of only 3.6 seconds a year due to time dilation and that's why atoms hang out so long but not their anti-matter reverse phases. This is what happens when you look at the Sun: a thousand years in the inertial frame of the week force is an hour of a day at the speed of light in time equal to distance at the speed of light relative to our body’s inertial frame of reference. Theata 13 shows there 3 points of observation within the weak force as I showed Erin Edwards in demonstrating the chemical source timing relative to a true inertial frame of reference that Mass location in time provides to create it’s placement within the DNA’s Gene Ensemble Instance Location. A new age in physics approaches awaiting your understanding to benefit Mankind.
And they all sound the same.