Book Review
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Physics in Perspective
Book Review Olival Freire Junior, David Bohm: A Life Dedicated to Understanding of the Quantum World, Cham: Springer, 2019, xi ? 250 pp., $84.99 (hardcover) Christian Forstner* With his scientific biography of David Bohm, the historian of science Olival Freire has published an important piece of work. The biography closes several gaps in the historical research on David Bohm. None of the previous works on Bohm (including my own) goes so deeply into his scientific work, or contextualizes it so fully. Whereas most of the previous works only considers a partial aspect of Bohm’s scientific work or personality, Freire provides a comprehensive picture and analyzes the change of this picture in political, philosophical, and cultural contexts. Bohm’s life was strongly influenced by the Cold War. The emerging conflict between East and West was already evident during the Second World War. At that time, Bohm was employed at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, investigating the behavior of plasma. He later developed this work further with his doctoral student David Pines. At the Radiation Laboratory, Bohm, together with a group of friends, founded a left-wing union group. Like many such groups, it was subjected to surveillance by the intelligence services, and these intelligence observations emerged after the end of the war, during the McCarthy era, and were used against Bohm. By this time Bohm was already a professor at Princeton. After he refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was charged with contempt of Congress. Princeton University suspended him and did not renew his contract. Bohm emigrated to Brazil in 1951. He subsequently relocated to Israel in 1955 and to Great Britain in 1957. Physics experienced an upswing in Brazil in the early 1950s. New institutions and positions were created, and numerous international conferences were initiated. Freire describes these developments clearly. During this time, Bohm was
* Christian Forstner is Heisenberg Fellow at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany. He graduated in physics and focused on the history of quantum mechanics and its interpretations during the Cold War for his PhD in history of science. His second book on nuclear physics and technology in Austria from a transnational perspective appeared in 2019. Since 2011, he has been the chairman of the Division for the History of Physics of the German Physical Society.
Book Review
Phys. Perspect.
focused on developing his interpretation of quantum mechanics with hidden variables and its philosophical interpretation. This led to an intensive cooperation with the French physicist Jean-Pierre Vigier. In Israel, together with his student Yakir Aharonov, he investigated the significance of vector potential in quantum mechanics. After the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he completely detached himself from Marxism in 1956. By the time he arrived in Great Britain, Bohm had moved away from his work on hidden variables. It was not u
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