A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made (particle physics) to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole (cosmology).

Etymology

The term "Physicist" was coined by English philosopher, priest, and historian of science William Whewell in 1840, to denote a cultivator of physics.

Education

Most material a student encounters in the undergraduate physics curriculum is based on discoveries and insights of a century or more in the past. Alhazen's intromission theory of light was formulated in the 11th century; Newton's laws of motion and Newton's law of universal gravitation were formulated in the 17th century; Maxwell's equations, 19th century; and quantum mechanics, early 20th century. The undergraduate physics curriculum generally includes the following range of courses: chemistry, classical physics, kinematics, astronomy and astrophysics, physics laboratory, electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, optics, modern physics, quantum physics, nuclear physics, particle physics, and solid state physics. Undergraduate physics students must also take extensive mathematics courses (calculus, differential equations, advanced calculus), and computer science and programming. Undergraduate physics students often perform research with faculty members.

Many positions, especially in research, require a doctoral degree. At the Master's level and higher, students tend to specialize in a particular field. Fields of specialization include experimental and theoretical astrophysics, atomic physics, molecular physics, biophysics, chemical physics, condensed matter physics, cosmology, geophysics, material science, nuclear physics, optics, particle physics, and plasma physics. Post-doctoral experience may be required for certain positions.

Employment

The three major employers of career physicists are academic institutions, government laboratories, and private industries, with the largest employer being the last. Many people who are trained as physicists, however, apply their skills to other activities, in particular to engineering, computing, and finance, often quite successfully. Some physicists take up additional careers where their knowledge of physics can be combined with further training in other disciplines, such as patent law in industry or private practice. In the United States, a majority of those in the private sections having a physics degree actually work outside the fields of physics, astronomy and engineering altogether.

Nobel laureate Sir Joseph Rotblat has suggested that physicists going into employment in scientific research should honour a Hippocratic Oath for Scientists.

Honors and awards

The highest honor awarded to physicists is the Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded since 1901 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

See also

Physics

American Institute of Physics

Engineering physics

History of physics

Institute of Physics (UK & Ireland)

List of physicists

Nobel Prize in physics

Professional physicist

References

Further reading

External links

Education and employment statistics from the American Institute of Physics

Occupational Outlook Handbook

Physicists and Astronomers; US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics

PhysicistTv

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Coordinates	33°51′35.9″N151°12′40″N
name	Michio Kaku
birth date	January 24, 1947
birth place	San Jose, California, United States
residence	New York City, New York, United States
nationality	American
field	Theoretical physics
work institutions	City University of New YorkNew York UniversityInstitute for Advanced Study
alma mater	Harvard University (B.S., 1968)University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D.,1972)
doctoral advisor	Stanley Mandelstam
known for	String field theory, Popular science
footnotes	}}

is an American theoretical physicist, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York of City University of New York, the co-founder of string field theory, and a "communicator" and "popularizer" of science. He has written several books on physics and related topics, he has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film, and he writes extensive online blogs and articles.

Early life and education

Kaku was born in San Jose, California to Japanese immigrant parents. His grandfather came to the United States to take part in the clean-up operation after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. His father was born in California but was educated in Japan and spoke little English. Both his parents were put in the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, where they met and where his two brothers were born.

At Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, Kaku assembled an atom smasher in his parent's garage for a science fair project. At the National Science Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he attracted the attention of physicist Edward Teller, who took Kaku as a protégé, awarding him the Hertz Engineering Scholarship. Kaku graduated ''summa cum laude'' from Harvard University in 1968 and was first in his physics class. He attended the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ph.D. in 1972, and in 1972 he held a lectureship at Princeton University.

During the Vietnam War, Kaku completed his U.S. Army basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia and his advanced infantry training at Fort Lewis, Washington. However, the Vietnam War ended before he was deployed as an infantryman.

Academic career

Kaku became a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and New York University. He currently holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York.

Kaku has had over 70 articles published in physics journals such as Physical Review, covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics. In 1974, along with Prof. Keiji Kikkawa of Osaka University, he authored the first papers describing string theory in a field form.

Kaku is the author of several textbooks on string theory and quantum field theory.

Popular science

Kaku is most widely known as a popularizer of science. He has written books and appeared on many television programs as well as film. He also hosts a weekly radio program.

Books

Kaku is the author of various popular science books.

''Physics of the Future''

''Physics of the Impossible''

''Hyperspace''

''Einstein's Cosmos''

''Parallel Worlds''

''Beyond Einstein'' (with Jennifer Thompson)

''Hyperspace'' was a best-seller and was voted one of the best science books of the year by both ''The New York Times'' and ''The Washington Post''. ''Parallel Worlds'' was a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction in the UK.

Radio

Kaku is the host of the weekly, one-hour radio program ''Explorations'', produced by the Pacifica Foundation's WBAI in New York. "Explorations" is syndicated to community and independent radio stations and makes previous broadcasts available on the program's website. Kaku defines the show as dealing with the general topics of science, war, peace, and the environment.

In April 2006, Kaku began broadcasting ''Science Fantastic'' on 90 commercial radio stations, the only nationally syndicated science program on commercial radio in the United States. It is syndicated by Talk Radio Network and now reaches 130 radio stations and America's Talk on XM. The program is formatted as a live listener call-in show, focusing on "futurology," which he defines as the future of science. Featured guests include Nobel laureates and top researchers on the topics of string theory, time travel, black holes, gene therapy, aging, space travel, artificial intelligence, and SETI. When Kaku is busy filming for television, ''Science Fantastic'' goes on hiatus, sometimes for several months. Kaku is also a frequent guest on many programs, where he is outspoken in all areas and issues he considers of importance, such as the program "Coast to Coast AM," where on 30 November 2007, he reaffirmed his belief that there is a 100% probability of extraterrestrial life in the universe.

Kaku has appeared on ''The Opie and Anthony Show'' a number of times, discussing popular fiction such as ''Back to The Future'', ''Lost,'' and the theories behind time-travel that these and other fictional entertainment focus on. Steven G. Spruill's novel ''The Janus Equation'', which describes the time travel of a post-op transsexual mating with her past self and thereby becoming father and mother to her present self, prompted Dr. Kaku's comment: "Well, you're in deep doo doo if that happens."

Television and film

Kaku has appeared in many forms of media and on many programs and networks, including ''Good Morning America'', ''The Screen Savers'', ''Larry King Live'', ''60 Minutes'', ''Nightline'', ''20/20'', ''Naked Science'', CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, Al Jazeera English, Fox News Channel, The History Channel, ''Conan'', The Science Channel, The Discovery Channel, TLC, ''Countdown with Keith Olbermann'', ''The Colbert Report'', ''The Art Bell Show'' and its successor, ''Coast To Coast AM'', ''BBC World News America'', ''The Opie & Anthony Show'', ''The Covino & Rich Show'', ''Head Rush'', ''The Late Show with David Letterman'', and ''Real Time with Bill Maher.

We Are the Guinea Pigs (1980)

Borders (1989)

''Synthetic Pleasures'' (1995)

Einstein Revealed (1996)

''Future Fantastic'' (1996)

''Stephen Hawking's Universe'' (1997)

Bioperfection: Building a New Human Race (1998)

Exodus Earth (1999)

Me & Isaac Newton (1999)

Space: The Final Junkyard (1999)

''Big Questions'' (2001)

''Parallel Universes'' (2001)

''Horizon'': "Time travel" (2003)

Robo sapiens (2003)

Brilliant Minds: Secret Of The Cosmos (2003)

''Nova'': "The Elegant Universe" (2003)

''Hawking'' (2004)

''The Screen Savers'' (2004)

''Unscrewed with Martin Sargent'' (2004)

''Alien Planet (2005)

''ABC News'' "UFOs: Seeing Is Believing" (2005)

''HARDtalk Extra'' (2005)

''Last Days on Earth'' (2005)

Obsessed & Scientific (2005)

''Horizon'': "Einstein's Unfinished Symphony" (2005)

Prophets of Science Fiction (2006)

''Time'' (2006)

''2057'' (2007)

''The Universe'' (2007)

Futurecar (2007)

''Attack of the Show!'' (2007)

''Visions of the Future'' (2008)

''Horizon'': "The President's Guide to Science" (2008)

Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe (2008)

''Horizon'': "Who's Afraid of a Big Black Hole" (2009–2010)

''Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible'' (2009–2010)

''Horizon'': "What Happened Before the Big Bang?" (2010)

''GameTrailers TV With Geoff Keighley'': "The Science of Games" (2010)

''How the Universe Works'' (2010)

''Through the Wormhole'' (2011)

In 1999, Kaku was one of the scientists profiled in the feature-length film ''Me and Isaac Newton'', directed by Michael Apted. It played theatrically in the United States, was later broadcast on national TV, and won several film awards.

In 2005, Kaku appeared in the short documentary ''Obsessed & Scientific.'' The film is about the possibility of time travel and the people who dream about it. It screened at the Montreal World Film Festival and a feature film expansion is in development talks. Kaku also appeared in the ABC documentary ''UFOs: Seeing Is Believing'', in which he suggested that while he believes it is extremely unlikely that extraterrestrials have ever actually visited Earth, we must keep our minds open to the possible existence of civilizations a million years ahead of us in technology, where entirely new avenues of physics open up. He also discussed the future of interstellar exploration and alien life in the Discovery Channel special ''Alien Planet'' as one of the multiple speakers who co-hosted the show, and Einstein's Theory of Relativity on The History Channel.

In February 2006, Kaku appeared as presenter in the BBC-TV four-part documentary ''Time'' which seeks to explore the mysterious nature of time. Part one of the series concerns personal time, and how we perceive and measure the passing of time. The second in the series deal with cheating time, exploring possibilities of extending the lifespan of organisms. The geological time covered in part three explores the ages of the earth and the sun. Part four covers the topics of cosmological time, the beginning of time and the events that occurred at the instant of the big bang.

On January 28, 2007, Kaku hosted the Discovery Channel series ''2057.'' This three-hour program discussed how medicine, the city, and energy could change over the next 50 years.

In 2008, Kaku hosted the three-hour BBC-TV documentary ''Visions of the Future'', on the future of computers, medicine, and quantum physics, and he appeared in several episodes of the History Channel's ''Universe'' series.

On December 1, 2009, he began hosting a 12-episode weekly TV series for the Science Channel at 10 pm, called ''Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible'', based on his best-selling book. Each 30-minute episode discusses the scientific basis behind imaginative schemes, such as time travel, parallel universes, warp drive, star ships, light sabers, force fields, teleportation, invisibility, death stars, and even superpowers and flying saucers. Each episode includes interviews with the world's top scientists working on prototypes of these technologies, interviews with sci-fi fans, clips from science fiction movies, and special effects and computer graphics. Although these inventions are impossible today, the series discusses when these technologies might become feasible in the future.

In 2010, he began to appear in a series on the website Gametrailers.com called ''Science of Games'', discussing the scientific aspects of various popular video games such as ''Mass Effect 2'' and ''Star Wars: The Force Unleashed''.

Kaku is popular in mainstream media because of his knowledge and his accessible approach to presenting complex subjects in science. While his technical writings are confined to theoretical physics, his public speaking and media appearances cover a broad range of topics, from the Kardashev scale to more esoteric subjects such as wormholes and time travel. In January 2007, Kaku visited Oman. While there, he talked at length to select members of that country's decision makers. In an interview with local media, Dr Kaku elaborated on his vision of mankind's future. Kaku considers climate change and terrorism as serious threats in man's evolution from a Type 0 civilization to Type 1.

On October 11, 2010, Michio Kaku appeared in the BBC program "What Happened Before the Big Bang" (along with Laura Mersini-Houghton, Andrei Linde, Roger Penrose, Lee Smolin, Neil Turok, and other notable cosmologists and physicists), where he propounded his theory of the universe created out of nothing.

Social policy advocacy

Kaku has publicly stated his concerns over matters including the anthropogenic cause of global warming, nuclear armament, nuclear power and the general misuse of science. He was critical of the Cassini–Huygens space probe because of the of plutonium contained in the craft for use by its radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Conscious of the possibility of casualties if the probe's fuel were dispersed into the environment during a malfunction and crash as the probe was making a 'sling-shot' maneuver around earth, Kaku publicly criticized NASA's risk assessment. He has also spoken on the dangers of space junk and called for more and better monitoring. Kaku is generally a vigorous supporter of the exploration of outer space, believing that the ultimate destiny of the human race may lie in extrasolar planets; but he is critical of some of the cost-ineffective missions and methods of NASA.

Kaku credits his anti-nuclear war position to programs he heard on the Pacifica Radio network, during his student years in California. It was during this period that he made the decision to turn away from a career developing the next generation of nuclear weapons in association with Edward Teller and focused on research, teaching, writing and media. Kaku joined with others such as Helen Caldicott, Jonathan Schell, Peace Action and was instrumental in building a global anti-nuclear weapons movement that arose in the 1980s, during the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

Kaku was a board member of Peace Action and on the board of radio station WBAI-FM in New York City where he originated his long running program, ''Explorations,'' that focused on the issues of science, war, peace and the environment.

His remark from an interview in support of SETI, "We could be in the middle of an intergalactic conversation...and we wouldn't even ''know''.", is used in the third Symphony of Science installment "Our Place in the Cosmos".

Personal life

Kaku is married to Shizue Kaku and has one daughter.

Bibliography

References

External links

Getting Physical: Dr. Michio Kaku Explains Einstein's Genius

Russia Takes Aim at Asteroids, op-ed on asteroid defense, Wall St. Journal, Jan. 5, 2010

''The Skeptics' Guide To The Universe'' interview

Michio Kaku on National Public Radio

Category:City College of New York faculty Category:American physicists Category:American radio personalities Category:City University of New York faculty Category:Princeton University faculty Category:Futurologists Category:Harvard University alumni Category:American academics of Japanese descent Category:American people of Japanese descent Category:Japanese-American civil rights activists Category:Pacifica Radio Category:String theorists Category:Theoretical physicists Category:University of California, Berkeley alumni Category:People from San Jose, California Category:1947 births Category:Living people

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Coordinates	33°51′35.9″N151°12′40″N
name	Edward Witten
birth date	August 26, 1951
birth place	Baltimore, Maryland
residence	Princeton, New Jersey
nationality	American
field	Theoretical physics Superstring Theory
work institution	Institute for Advanced StudyHarvard UniversityCalifornia Institute of TechnologyPrinceton University
alma mater	Brandeis University (B.A.) Princeton University (PhD)
doctoral advisor	David Gross
doctoral students	Jonathan Bagger Cumrun Vafa Steven Giddings Xiao-Gang Wen Eva Silverstein Shamit Kachru Sergei Gukov Mukund Rangamani Tamar Friedmann Peter Srvcek Christopher BeasleyDror Bar-Natan
known for	String theory M-theory Quantum Gravity Quantum Field TheorySupersymmetry
prizes	MacArthur Fellowship (1982) Dirac Medal (1985) Albert Einstein Award (1985) Fields Medal (1990)Henri Poincaré Prize (2006)Alan T. Waterman Award (1995) Nemmers Prize (2000) Henniemen Award (2004)Harvey Prize (2005)Crafoord Prize (2008)Lorentz Medal (2010)Isaac Newton Medal (2010)
spouse	Chiara Nappi
website	http://www.sns.ias.edu/~witten/
footnotes	}}

Edward Witten (born August 26, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist with a focus on mathematical physics who is currently the Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Witten is a leading researcher in superstring theory, a theory of quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theories and other areas of mathematical physics. He is regarded by some of his peers as one of the greatest living physicists, perhaps even a successor to Albert Einstein.

He has also made seminal contributions in mathematics and helped bridge gaps between fundamental physics and various areas of mathematics. In 1990 he was awarded a Fields Medal by the International Union of Mathematics, which is the highest honor in mathematics and often regarded as the Nobel Prize equivalent for mathematics. He is the only physicist to have received this honor.

Birth and education

Witten was born in Baltimore, Maryland to a Jewish family, the son of Lorraine W. Witten and Louis Witten, a theoretical physicist specializing in gravitation and general relativity.

Witten attended the Park School of Baltimore (class of '68), and went on to receive his Bachelor of Arts with a major in history and minor in linguistics from Brandeis University in 1971. He planned to become a political journalist, and published articles in ''The New Republic'' and ''The Nation''. In 1968 Witten published an article in ''The Nation'' arguing that the New Left had no strategy. He worked briefly for George McGovern, a Democratic presidential nominee in 1972. McGovern lost the election in a landslide to Richard Nixon.

Witten attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison for one semester as an economics graduate student before dropping out. He then returned to academia, enrolling in applied mathematics at Princeton University before shifting departments and receiving a Ph.D. in physics in 1976 under David Gross, the 2004 Nobel laureate in Physics. He held a fellowship at Harvard University (1976–77), was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (1977–80), and held a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (1982).

Academic career

After completing his Ph.D., he worked at Harvard University as a Junior Fellow and at Princeton as a professor. He was a Professor of Physics at Princeton University from 1980 to 1987. He also was briefly at Caltech for two years from 1999 to 2001. He is currently the Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Witten has the highest ''h''-index (144) of any living physicist.

Research and seminal works

Witten has made extensive contributions to theoretical physics, in work that has spawned a large number of highly mathematical results. He has more than 350 publications primarily in quantum field theory and string theory and in related areas of topology and geometry. Witten is widely regarded by his peers to be one of the most important theoretical physicists in the last century. While it is difficult to categorize his deep and very influential work in certain terms, on the physics side Witten focuses on supersymmetry and on the mathematical side a lot of his work is on ideas of topology. Witten has shown through his various pioneering contributions that these things are related in a deep way at a fundamental level.

One of Witten's early contributions in physics is a natural solution to the so called hierarchy problem. The Standard Model of Particle Physics predicts a particle known as Higgs Boson. Its mass however seems much lighter than what the Model predicts. Witten has shown that the mechanism of broken supersymmetry offers a natural explanation to the hierarchy problem. In supersymmetry theory, the Witten Index tells whether supersymmetry is broken or not. Witten went on to make seminal contributions in supersymmetric gauge theories. Along with Nathan Seiberg of the Institute of Advanced Studies Witten developed what is now known as Seiberg-Witten Theory which is related to Donaldson theory in mathematics.

Witten is clearly the leading figure in the development of string theory which is a leading candidate for the theory of all the forces in nature. Even as early as 1984, Witten worked on an important problem of gravitational anomaly which paved the way to what is known as the first string theory revolution. Also, with Gary Horowitz, Philip Candelas and Andy Strominger Witten showed how string theory can lead to realistic descriptions by compactifying the theory on a higher dimensional manifold known as Calabi Yau manifolds. In the string theory conference at University of Southern California in the mid-'90s, Witten dazzled the conference by solving a major outstanding problem of how five different versions of string theory were just the same theory which are related to one another by dualities. Also, Witten conjectured the existence of a unifying theory called M-theory whose complete structures had not been discovered yet and non-technically could be described as what could be possibly the most fundamental physical theory of the universe. Stephen Hawking, in his book ''The Grand Design'', wrote that M-theory may be the ultimate theory of the universe.

Edward Witten's other important contribution to physics was to a relatively recent result of gauge gravity duality. In 1997, Juan Maldacena formulated an important result establishing a relationship between gauge theories and a certain theory of gravity commonly known as AdS/CFT correspondence. This revolutionary discovery has dominated theoretical physics for the past 15 years and Witten's work following Maldacena's insight has shed extremely important light on this very important relationship. His many other contributions include a simplified proof of the positive energy theorem involving spinors in general relativity, his work relating supersymmetry and Morse theory, his introduction of topological quantum field theory and related work on mirror symmetry, knot theory, twistor theory and D-branes and their intersections.

Witten was awarded the Fields Medal by the International Mathematical Union in 1990, becoming the first physicist to win the prize. Sir Michael Atiyah said of Witten, "Although he is definitely a physicist, his command of mathematics is rivaled by few mathematicians... Time and again he has surprised the mathematical community by a brilliant application of physical insight leading to new and deep mathematical theorems... he has made a profound impact on contemporary mathematics. In his hands physics is once again providing a rich source of inspiration and insight in mathematics." One such example of his impact on pure mathematics is his framework for understanding the Jones polynomial using Chern–Simons theory. This had far reaching implications on low-dimensional topology and led to quantum invariants such as the Witten–Reshetikhin–Turaev invariants.

Witten has been described as "the most brilliant physicist of his generation", and "one of the world's greatest living physicists, perhaps even Einstein's successor". In 1995, he suggested the existence of M-theory at a conference at the University of Southern California and used it to explain a number of previously observed dualities sparking a flurry of new research in string theory called the second superstring revolution.

Personal life

Witten is married to Chiara Nappi, a professor of physics at Princeton University. They have two daughters, Ilana and Daniela, and one son, Raphael (Rafi), and a granddaughter Nava. His brother, Matt Witten, is a screenwriter and producer for several popular TV series including ''Law & Order'' and ''House''. Edward Witten serves on the board of directors of Americans for Peace Now.

Awards and honors

Witten has been honored with numerous awards including a MacArthur Grant (1982), the Fields Medal (1990), the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics (2000), the National Medal of Science (2002), Pythagoras Award (2005), the Henri Poincaré Prize (2006), the Crafoord Prize (2008), the Lorentz Medal (2010) and the Isaac Newton Medal (2010). Pope Benedict XVI appointed Witten as a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (2006). He also appeared in the list of ''TIME'' magazine's 100 most influential people of 2004.

See also

Gromov–Witten invariant

Hořava–Witten domain wall

M theory

Seiberg–Witten gauge theory

Seiberg–Witten invariant

Vafa–Witten theorem

Weinberg–Witten theorem

Wess–Zumino–Witten model

Witten index

References

External links

Faculty webpage

Publications on ArXiv

Witten theme tree on arxiv.org

Futurama episode information

Institute of Physics profile

Category:1951 births Category:20th-century mathematicians Category:Albert Einstein Medal recipients Category:American mathematicians Category:American physicists Category:Foreign Members of the Royal Society Category:Brandeis University alumni Category:Fields Medalists Category:Harvard Fellows Category:Institute for Advanced Study faculty Category:ISI highly cited researchers Category:Jewish American scientists Category:Living people Category:MacArthur Fellows Category:Members of the French Academy of Sciences Category:Members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences Category:National Medal of Science laureates Category:Princeton University alumni Category:Princeton University faculty Category:String theorists Category:Theoretical physicists Category:University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni

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Coordinates	33°51′35.9″N151°12′40″N
Name	John Hagelin
Birth date	June 09, 1954
Birth place	Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Death date
Resting place coordinates
Residence	Fairfield, Iowa, USA
Known for	Three-time candidate for U.S. President, physicist, and administrator
Education	Ph.D. Harvard University, 1981
Doctoral advisor	Howard Georgi
Alma mater	Dartmouth College, Harvard University
Employer	Maharishi University of Management, US Peace Government
Occupation	Professor
Title	Raja of Invincible America, President of the US Peace Government, and others
Party	Natural Law Party
Spouse	Margaret (1985–1993) divorced Kara Anastasio (2010)
Awards	Kilby, Ig Nobel
Website	http://www.hagelin.org
Footnotes	}}

John Hagelin (born June 9, 1954) is an American particle physicist, three-time candidate of the Natural Law Party for President of the United States (1992, 1996, and 2000), and the director of the Transcendental Meditation movement for the US.

Hagelin was a researcher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), and is now Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy at Maharishi University of Management. He has conducted research into unified field theory and the Maharishi Effect.

Hagelin was appointed Raja of Invincible America by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and is also President of the US Peace Government. He is Executive Director of the International Center for Invincible Defense, Executive Director of the Global Financial Capital of New York, Executive Director of the Center for Leadership Performance, Director of the Board of Advisors for the David Lynch Foundation, Honorary Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Maharishi University of Management, and International Director of the Global Union of Scientists for Peace.

Early life and education

John Samuel Hagelin was born June 9, 1954, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. During childhood, he played soccer, hockey and the piano. Hagelin won a scholarship to Taft School for boys, where he received a perfect score of 165 on a school-administered IQ test and, according to Neil Dickie of The Iowa Source, "(...) was also a dare-devil". In 1970, while at Taft, he was involved in a motorcycle crash that led to hospitalization and a full body cast. During this time, one of his teachers introduced him to quantum mechanics, and he also learned the Transcendental Meditation technique, both of which had major impacts on his life.

Hagelin later graduated from Taft and attended Dartmouth College on a scholarship. After his freshman year, a continued interest in Transcendental Meditation led him to Vittel, France, where he completed the studies necessary to become a qualified teacher of the Transcendental Meditation technique. While at Dartmouth, he earned an undergraduate degree in physics in three years with highest honors (summa cum laude). He also co-authored and published papers in physics research and won a fellowship to study physics at Harvard. While at Harvard, Hagelin worked under the noted physicists Howard Georgi and Sheldon Glashow, best known for their work in Grand Unification theory (GUT). He received a Master's degree from Harvard in 1976, and a Ph.D. in 1981.

Professional careers

Scientist and academic

By the time Hagelin had received his Ph.D. from Harvard, he had already published "several serious papers" on particle theory. In 1981, Hagelin won a postdoctoral research appointment at CERN (the European Center for Particle Physics) in Switzerland, and in 1983 was recruited by SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), CERN's North American counterpart.

In 1984, Hagelin shifted his appointment from SLAC to Maharishi International University (MIU), where he continued his research in physics, pursued a long-time interest in brain and cognitive science research, and established an accredited doctoral program in theoretical physics. Hagelin's move to MIU in 1984 surprised and puzzled his colleagues. Howard Georgi and John Ellis tried to talk him out of it. But, according to Georgi, Hagelin "continued to do good physics anyway." Nobel Laureate, Sheldon Glashow was quoted in a 1992 article as saying, "His papers are outstanding. We read them before he went to MIU and we read them now." Hagelin remained in contact with colleagues from Harvard, Stanford, and CERN, and continued to collaborate with them. While at MIU, his contributions to the field of theoretical physics were supported by funding from the National Science Foundation.

Hagelin is a Professor of Physics at Maharishi University of Management (formerly MIU). Hagelin is also identified as the Founding President of Maharishi Central University, which was announced in 2007. Central University was under construction in Smith Center, Kansas at the site of a previously-announced Peace Palace until early 2008, when, according to Hagelin, the project was put on hold while the TM organization dealt with the death of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Theoretical physics research

During his time at CERN, SLAC and Maharishi University of Management (MUM), Hagelin worked on supersymmetric extensions of the standard model and grand unification theories. In the years 1979-1996, Hagelin collaborated with many leading figures and published more than 70 papers in the fields of particle physics, electroweak unification, grand unification, supersymmetry, and cosmology, most of them in prestigious scientific journals. Several were described as "core papers" that were among the 20 most cited references in physics in their respective years, according to Current Contents magazine. This includes his work on the "flipped SU(5), heterotic superstring theory" that is considered one of the more successful unified field theories or "theories of everything" and was highlighted in a cover story in ''Discover'' magazine.

Hagelin co-authored a 1983 paper entitled "Weak symmetry breaking by radiative corrections in broken supergravity", which is included in a list of the 103 articles in the physical sciences that were cited the most times during the years 1983 and 1984. A 1984 study titled "Supersymmetric relics from the big bang", had been cited over 500 times as of 2007.

Critics of Hagelin have included physicist Peter Woit and journalist Christopher Andersen. Peter Woit in his book, ''Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and The Search for Unity In Physical Law'', precedes his critical remarks by acknowledging Hagelin as having published papers in prestigious journals that would eventually be cited in over a hundred other papers. Christopher Anderson wrote in a 1992 news article in ''Nature'' that Hagelin, co-developer of one of the "better-accepted" unified field theories known as the Flipped SU(5) model, "is by all accounts a gifted researcher well known and respected by his colleagues".

Research on consciousness and the unified field

In 1987 and 1989, Hagelin published two papers in the Maharishi University of Management's ''Journal of Modern Science and Vedic Science'' on the relationship between physics and consciousness. These papers discuss the Vedic understanding of consciousness as a field and compares it with theories of the unified field derived by modern physics. Hagelin argues that these two fields have almost identical properties and quantitative structure, and he presents other theoretical and empirical arguments that the two fields are actually one and the same — specifically, that the experience of unity at the basis of the mind achieved during the meditative state is the subjective experience of the very same fundamental unity of existence revealed by unified field theories.

Research on the Maharishi Effect

As evidence for this explanation, Hagelin points to the body of research supporting the positive effects created by Transcendental Meditation and the more advanced TM-Sidhi program (which includes a practice called "Yogic Flying") which are said to have measurable effects on social trend parameters. This phenomenon is called the "Maharishi Effect". Hagelin cites numerous studies of such effects, and in the summer of 1993, he conducted a large scale study of the same type. Approximately 4,000 TM-Sidhi program practitioners gathered in Washington, D.C., where they practiced the TM-Sidhi techniques twice daily in a group for several weeks. Using data obtained from the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department for 1993 and the preceding five years (1988–1992), Hagelin and collaborators followed the changes in crime rates for the area before, during, and after the 6 weeks when the group was gathered in Washington, D.C. In 1999, the study, which controlled for effects of temperature changes and showed a highly statistically significant drop in crime, was published in ''Social Indicators Research''. During the eight weeks of the study, the overall level of violent crime (homicides, rapes, and assaults) decreased by 23%, with rapes declining by 58%. Homicides averaged 10 a week during the study—the same as in the weeks preceding and following the study. For most of the eight weeks of the study the homicide rate declined, but gang fighting resulted in ten murders in a 36 hour period. Robert L. Park, research professor and former chair of the Physics Department at the University of Maryland and well known skeptic of paranormal claims, dismissed the study as a "clinic in data manipulation" and accused Hagelin and his team of scientific misconduct. Maxwell Rainforth, Assistant Professor of Physiology and Health and Statistics at Maharishi University of Management and a coauthor of the Washington, D.C. study, characterized Park's criticisms of the study as "superficial, highly polemical" and "willfully misleading".

Reception of Hagelin's connection of unified field of physics to the Maharishi Effect

Hagelin's interest in the connection between quantum physics and the Maharishi Effect has been discussed by both colleagues and critics. Hagelin was invited to be a plenary speaker at the 2007 Quantum Mind conference in Salzburg, Austria, organized by Stuart Hameroff (University of Arizona) and Gustav Bernroider (University of Salzburg). Hagelin was a featured scientist in the popular movies, ''What the Bleep Do We Know!?'', ''What the Bleep? Down the Rabbit Hole'' (2006) and ''The Secret'', which renewed interest in the quantum mind paradigm. Science writer Simon Singh questioned the credibility and motives of the interviewees in the film, and advised against seeing ''What the Bleep Do We Know!?'' as it would leave viewers misinformed.

Both Woit and Anderson have commented critically on Hagelin's interest in and publications on consciousness research. Woit says identifying a unified field of consciousness with a unified field of superstring theory is wishful thinking. He also asserts that most physicists think Hagelin's views are nonsense. Anderson says Hagelin's investigations into how the extension of grand unified theories of physics to human consciousness could explain the way Transcendental Meditation is said to influence world events "disturbs many researchers" and "infuriates his former collaborators." Dallas Observer political reporter Jonathan Fox wrote that "Once considered a top scientist, Hagelin's former academic peers ostracized him after the candidate attempted to shoehorn Eastern metaphysical musings into the realm of quantum physics." According to Woit, Hagelin began connecting consciousness and the unified field in the late 1970s as a Ph.D. student at Harvard. Hagelin's collaborative work in particle physics continued until 1994. Anderson says that John Ellis, director of CERN, was worried about guilt by association. Anderson quotes Ellis as saying "I was afraid that people might regard [Hagelin's assertions] as rather flaky, and that might rub off on the theory or on us."

Hagelin's linkage of quantum mechanics and unified field theory with consciousness was critiqued by University of Iowa philosophy and sociology professors Evan Fales and Barry Markovsky in the journal ''Social Forces''. They wrote that Hagelin's equating consciousness with the unified field relies on a similarity between quantum mechanical properties of fields and consciousness, and that his arguments rely on ambiguity and obscurity in characterizing these properties. They dismiss Hagelin's parallels between the Vedas and contemporary unified field theories as a reliance on ambiguity and vague analogy supported by constructing arbitrary similarities. David Orme-Johnson and Robert Oates, retired colleagues of Hagelin from MUM, replied to this critique in the ''Journal of Scientific Exploration'' and said, in part, that Fales' and Markovsky's accusation of "vagueness" and "ambiguity" on Hagelin's part are in themselves vague and ambiguous and that there is no standard against which they can be evaluated.

Entrepreneur

In 1990, Hagelin founded Enlightened Audio Designs Corporation (EAD) with electronics engineer Alastair Roxburgh. As President and Director of Research of EAD, Hagelin designed and manufactured high-end digital-to-analog (D-to-A) converters that were critically acclaimed. In 1996, EAD was the first company in the world to develop and commercialize home theater surround-sound processors incorporating multi-channel digital surround-sound technologies, such as Dolby Digital and DTS. In 2001, EAD Corporation was sold to the Oregon-based company Alpha Digital Technologies.

Politician

Natural Law Party

The Natural Law Party (NLP) was founded in 1992 in Fairfield, Iowa by Hagelin and a group of 12 educators, scientists, business leaders, and other professionals who desired a more scientific approach to national administration that would promote field-tested solutions to the nation's problems. The party platform included preventive health care, sustainable agriculture and renewable energy technologies. During his campaigns, Hagelin favored abortion rights without public financing, campaign-finance law reform and improved gun control. He proposed a flat tax and no tax for families earning less than $34,000 a year. Hagelin also campaigned to eradicate PACs and soft money campaign contributions and advocated safety locks on guns. He endorsed school vouchers and efforts to prevent war in the Middle East by reducing "people's tension".

The party chose Hagelin and Michael Tompkins as its presidential and vice-presidential candidates in 1992 and 1996.

Hagelin ran for President again in the 2000 Presidential election, being nominated both by the NLP and by the Perot wing of the Reform Party, which disputed the nomination of Pat Buchanan. Hagelin's running mate in the 2000 election was Nat Goldhaber, an entrepreneur who, like Hagelin and Tompkins, was a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation.

A dispute over the Reform Party's nomination generated "legal action" between the Hagelin and Buchanan campaigns. In September 2000, the Federal Election Commission ruled that Buchanan was the official candidate of the Reform Party, and hence, was eligible to receive federal election funds. As part of the ruling, the Reform Party convention that nominated Hagelin was declared invalid. In spite of the ruling, Hagelin remained on several state ballots as the Reform Party nominee, due to the independent nature of various state affiliates. He also was the national nominee of the Natural Law Party, and in New York was the Independence Party nominee.

During his 2000 campaign, Hagelin appeared on ABC's ''Nightline'' (2000) and ''Politically Incorrect'' (2000), NBC's ''Meet the Press'' (2000), CNN's ''Larry King Live'', PBS's News Hour with Jim Lehrer, ''Inside Politics'', CNBC's ''Hardball with Chris Matthews'', and C-SPAN's ''Washington Journal''.

Hagelin's Presidential electoral results: 1992 - Ballot status in 32 states - 39,212 votes 1996 - Ballot status in 43 states - 113,659 votes 2000 - Ballot status in 39 states - 83,714 votes

In the middle of the 2000 campaign, Hagelin said that having the party's principles reach the "marketplace of ideas" and be co-opted by the Democrats and Republicans would be a victory.

In April 2004, the U.S. Natural Law Party officially disbanded its national organization, although a few state parties may still be active. In the 2004 primary elections, Hagelin and the Natural Law Party endorsed Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich.

In 2010, Hagelin married Kara Anastasio, the former vice-chair of the Natural Law Party of Ohio.

Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy

Hagelin is the Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, a think tank at Maharishi University of Management. According to their website, he has met with members of Congress and officials at the Department of State, and the Department of Defense on the issue of terrorism.

Hagelin helped to write a paragraph in Hillary Rodham Clinton's 10,000-page health proposal. He says that it was the only paragraph in the document that concerned health and preventive care.

In 1998, Hagelin gave testimony to the National Institutes of Health, DNA Advisory Committee on germ-line technologies, stating that recombinant DNA technology is inherently risky because of the high probability of unexpected side-effects.

Hagelin moderated a panel on stress at a June 3, 1999 Congressional Prevention Coalition caucus.

US Peace Government and Invincible America

Hagelin established the US Peace Government (USPG) on July 4, 2003, as an affiliate of the Global Country of World Peace. The US Peace Government and the Global Country of World Peace were created to promote evidence-based and sustainable solutions as well as policies of governance that are aligned with Natural Law. As president of the USPG, Hagelin presides over a national assembly of USPG state representatives or governors, who in turn preside over US Peace Government assemblies and capital buildings in their respective states. The USPG announced plans to build a national capital in Washington Township, Smith County, Kansas, near the geographic center of America. The offices for the U.S. Peace Government are located in Maharishi Vedic City, Iowa, and the office of the President was at The Jefferson hotel, Washington, D.C. in 2004.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi appointed Hagelin as the "Raja of Invincible America" on November 19, 2007. Hagelin organized the Invincible America Assembly in Fairfield, Iowa which began in July 2006. The assembly consists of a group of individuals practicing the Transcendental Meditation and the TM-Sidhi techniques in a group, twice daily. Hagelin stated in a press release announcing the project that "for the United States, with a population of just over 300 million, the required number of peace-creating experts is 1,730". According to the Global Good News website "on 28 November 2006, the United States achieved invincibility and is stabilizing the number of Yogic Flyers—rising from 1,600 to 1,730—assembled at the Invincible America Assembly in Fairfield, Iowa". In addition, Hagelin's Institute for Science Technology and Public Policy web site says that the Invincible America Assembly in Iowa "is rising quickly toward its target of 2,500".

In July, 2007, Hagelin predicted that when the number of assembly participants reached 2,500, which he said would happen within a year, America would have a major drop in crime, and see the virtual elimination of all major social and political woes in the United States. Hagelin said that the Assembly was responsible for the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaching a record high of 14,022 earlier that month, and predicted that the Dow would top 17,000 within a year.

Awards

In 1992, Hagelin was honored with a Kilby International Award which "recognizes scientists who have made major contributions to society through their applied research in the fields of science and technology". The award was given for his work in particle physics leading to the development of supersymmetric grand unified field theories, for his innovative applications of advanced principles from control systems theory and optimization theory to digital sound reproduction, and for his research on human consciousness. Chris Anderson questioned the value of the award in an article about Hagelin published in ''Nature''.

In 1994, Hagelin received the Ig Nobel Prize for Peace, an annual parody award presented at Harvard University which "honor[s] achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think". The Master of ceremony and award's founder Mark Abrahams called it the world's most "(un)coveted award for achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced" which are given to "honor the world's largely overlooked scientists and other contributors to modern culture, who bring smiles and guffaws to others, whether intentional or not." Hagelin received the prize for his "experimental conclusion that 4,000 trained meditators caused an 18 percent decrease in violent crime in Washington, D.C."

Books

References

Further reading

Hagelin, J.S. ''Manual for a Perfect Government: How to Harness the Laws of Nature to Bring Maximum Success to Governmental Administration''. Maharishi University of Management Press, 1998.

Freedman, David H: The new theory of everything. ''Discover'', 1991, pp 54–61.

Hagelin, J: Is consciousness the unified field? A field theorist's perspective. ''Modern Science and Vedic Science'' 1, 1987, pp 29–87.

Hagelin, JS: Restructuring physics from its foundation in light of Maharishi's Vedic Science. ''Modern Science and Vedic Science'' 3, 1989, pp 3–72.

External links

Official site

MUM Faculty

PBS Bio

Invincible America Assembly daily tally

Political Platform

PBS Interview, 2000

LA Yoga Interview 2006

Category:1954 births Category:Dartmouth College alumni Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Ig Nobel Prize winners Category:Living people Category:Particle physicists Category:Politicians from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Category:Quantum mysticism Category:Transcendental Meditation practitioners Category:Transcendental Meditation researchers Category:United States presidential candidates, 1992 Category:United States presidential candidates, 1996 Category:United States presidential candidates, 2000 Category:Natural Law Party (United States) politicians

fr:John Hagelin it:John Hagelin pt:John Hagelin ru:Хагелин, Джон sv:John Hagelin

Coordinates	33°51′35.9″N151°12′40″N
Name	David Bohm
Birth date	December 20, 1917
Birth place
Death date	December 20, 1917
Death place	London, UK
Residence	United Kingdom
Citizenship	British
Nationality	British
Ethnicity	Hungarian-Lithuanian Jewish
Fields	Physicist
Workplaces	Manhattan Project Princeton University University of São Paulo Technion University of Bristol Birkbeck College
Alma mater	Pennsylvania State College California Institute of Technology University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral advisor	Robert Oppenheimer
Doctoral students	Yakir Aharonov David Pines Jeffrey Bub Henri Bortoft
Known for	Bohm-diffusion Bohm interpretation Aharonov-Bohm effect Holographic paradigm Holonomic brain theory Bohm Dialogue
Author abbrev bot
Author abbrev zoo
Influences	Albert Einstein Jiddu Krishnamurti Arthur Schopenhauer Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Influenced	John Stewart Bell
Footnotes	}}

David Joseph Bohm (20 December 1917 – 27 October 1992) was an American-born British quantum physicist who contributed to theoretical physics, philosophy, neuropsychology, and the Manhattan Project.

Biography

Youth and college

Bohm was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania to a Hungarian Jewish immigrant father and a Lithuanian Jewish mother. He was raised mainly by his father, a furniture store owner and assistant of the local rabbi. Bohm attended Pennsylvania State College (now The Pennsylvania State University), graduating in 1939, then attended the California Institute of Technology for a year, and then transferred to the theoretical physics group directed by Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley, where he eventually obtained his doctorate degree.

Bohm lived in the same neighborhood as some of Oppenheimer's other graduate students (Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, Joseph Weinberg, and Max Friedman) and with them became increasingly involved not only with physics, but with radical politics. Bohm became active in organizations like the Young Communist League, the Campus Committee to Fight Conscription, and the Committee for Peace Mobilization all later termed Communist organizations by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.

Work and doctorate

Manhattan Project contributions

During World War II, the Manhattan Project mobilized much of Berkeley's physics research in the effort to produce the first atomic bomb. Though Oppenheimer had asked Bohm to work with him at Los Alamos (the top-secret laboratory established in 1942 to design the atom bomb), the director of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves, would not approve Bohm's security clearance, after evidence about his politics (Bohm's friend, Joseph Weinberg, had also been suspected for espionage).

Bohm remained in Berkeley, teaching physics, until he completed his Ph.D. in 1943, by an unusually ironic circumstance. According to Peat (see reference below, p. 64), "the scattering calculations (of collisions of protons and deuterons) that he had completed proved useful to the Manhattan Project and were immediately classified. Without security clearance, Bohm was denied access to his own work; not only would he be barred from defending his thesis, he was not even allowed to write his own thesis in the first place!" To satisfy the university, Oppenheimer certified that Bohm had successfully completed the research. He later performed theoretical calculations for the Calutrons at the Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, used to electromagnetically enrich uranium for use in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

McCarthyism leads to Bohm leaving the United States

After the war, Bohm became an assistant professor at Princeton University, where he worked closely with Albert Einstein. In May, 1949, at the beginning of the McCarthyism period, the House Un-American Activities Committee called upon Bohm to testify before it— because of his previous ties to suspected Communists. Bohm, however, pleaded the Fifth amendment right to refuse to testify, and refused to give evidence against his colleagues.

In 1950, Bohm was charged for refusing to answer questions of the Committee and was arrested. He was acquitted in May, 1951, but Princeton University had already suspended him. After the acquittal, Bohm's colleagues sought to have him re-instated to Princeton, and Einstein reportedly wanted Bohm to serve as his assistant. The university, however, did not renew his contract. Bohm then left for Brazil to assume a professorship of Physics at the University of São Paulo.

Quantum theory and Bohm-diffusion

During his early period, Bohm made a number of significant contributions to physics, particularly to quantum mechanics and relativity theory. As a post-graduate at Berkeley, he developed a theory of plasmas, discovering the electron phenomenon known now as Bohm-diffusion. His first book, ''Quantum Theory'' published in 1951, was well-received by Einstein, among others. However, Bohm became dissatisfied with the orthodox interpretation of quantum theory, which he had written about in that book, and began to develop his own interpretation (De Broglie–Bohm theory)— a non-local hidden variable deterministic theory the predictions of which agree perfectly with the nondeterministic quantum theory. His work and the EPR argument became the major factor motivating John Bell's inequality, the consequences of which are still being investigated.

The Aharonov-Bohm effect

In 1955, Bohm relocated to Israel, where he spent two years working at the Technion at Haifa. Here he met Sarah Woolfson (also called ''Saral)''. The couple married in 1956. In 1957, Bohm relocated to the United Kingdom as a research fellow at the University of Bristol. In 1959, Bohm and his student Yakir Aharonov discovered the Aharonov-Bohm effect, showing how a magnetic field could affect a region of space in which the field had been shielded, although its vector potential did not vanish there. This showed for the first time that the magnetic vector potential, hitherto a mathematical convenience, could have real physical (quantum) effects. In 1961, Bohm was made Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of London's Birkbeck College, where his collected papers are kept.

The holonomic model of the brain

In collaboration with Stanford neuroscientist Karl Pribram Bohm was involved in the early development of the holonomic model of the functioning of the brain, a model for human cognition that is drastically different from conventionally accepted ideas. Bohm worked with Pribram on the theory that the brain operates in a manner similar to a hologram, in accordance with quantum mathematical principles and the characteristics of wave patterns.

''Thought as a System''

Bohm was alarmed by what he considered an increasing imbalance of not only man and nature, but among peoples, as well as people, themselves. Bohm: "So one begins to wonder what is going to happen to the human race. Technology keeps on advancing with greater and greater power, either for good or for destruction." He goes on to ask:

What is the source of all this trouble? I'm saying that the source is basically in thought. Many people would think that such a statement is crazy, because thought is the one thing we have with which to solve our problems. That's part of our tradition. Yet it looks as if the thing we use to solve our problems with is the source of our problems. It's like going to the doctor and having him make you ill. In fact, in 20% of medical cases we do apparently have that going on. But in the case of thought, it's far over 20%.

In Bohm's view:

...the general tacit assumption in thought is that it's just telling you the way things are and that it's not doing anything - that 'you' are inside there, deciding what to do with the info. But you don't decide what to do with the info. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us.

Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally. This is another major feature of thought: Thought doesn't know it is doing something and then it struggles against what it is doing. It doesn't want to know that it is doing it. And thought struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call "sustained incoherence".

Bohm thus proposes in his book, ''Thought as a System,'' a pervasive, systematic nature of thought:

What I mean by "thought" is the whole thing - thought, ''felt,'' the body, the whole society sharing thoughts - it's all one process. It is essential for me not to break that up, because it's all one process; somebody else's thoughts becomes my thoughts, and vice versa. Therefore it would be wrong and misleading to break it up into my thoughts, your thoughts, my feelings, these feelings, those feelings... I would say that thought makes what is often called in modern language a ''system''. A system means a set of connected things or parts. But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent - not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence. A corporation is organized as a system - it has this department, that department, that department. They don't have any meaning separately; they only can function together. And also the body is a system. Society is a system in some sense. And so on.

Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thoughts, "felts" and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society - as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times. A system is constantly engaged in a process of development, change, evolution and structure changes...although there are certain features of the system which become relatively fixed. We call this the ''structure''.... Thought has been constantly evolving and we can't say when that structure began. But with the growth of civilization it has developed a great deal. It was probably very simple thought before civilization, and now it has become very complex and ramified and has much more incoherence than before.

Now, I say that this system has a fault in it - a "systematic fault". It is not a fault here, there or here, but it is a fault that is all throughout the system. Can you picture that? It is everywhere and nowhere. You may say "I see a problem here, so I will bring my thoughts to bear on this problem". But "my" thought is part of the system. It has the same fault as the fault I'm trying to look at, or a similar fault.

Thought is constantly creating problems that way and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn’t notice that it's creating them, and the more it thinks, the more problems it creates. (P. 18-19)

====Bohm Dialogue==== To address societal problems during his later years, Bohm wrote a proposal for a solution that has become known as "Bohm Dialogue", in which equal status and "free space" form the most important prerequisites of communication and the appreciation of differing personal beliefs. He suggested that if these ''Dialogue groups'' were experienced on a sufficiently wide scale, they could help overcome the isolation and fragmentation Bohm observed was inherent in society.

Later years

Bohm continued his work in quantum physics past his retirement in 1987. His final work, the posthumously published ''The Undivided Universe: An ontological interpretation of quantum theory'' (1993), resulted from a decades-long collaboration with his colleague Basil Hiley. He also spoke to audiences across Europe and North America on the importance of dialogue as a form of sociotherapy, a concept he borrowed from London psychiatrist and practitioner of Group Analysis Patrick De Mare, and had a series of meetings with the Dalai Lama. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1990.

Near the end of his life, Bohm began to experience a recurrence of depression which he had suffered at earlier times in his life. He was admitted to the Maudsley Hospital in South London on 10 May 1991. His condition worsened and it was decided that the only treatment that might help him was electroconvulsive therapy. Bohm's wife consulted psychiatrist David Shainberg, Bohm's long-time friend and collaborator, who agreed that electroconvulsive treatments were probably his only option. Bohm showed improvement from the treatments and was released on 29 August. However, his depression returned and was treated with medication.

David Bohm died of a heart failure in Hendon, London, on 27 October 1992, aged 74. He had been traveling in a London taxicab on that day; after not getting any response from the passenger in the back seat for a few seconds, the driver turned back and found that Dr. Bohm had died. David Bohm was widely considered one of the best quantum physicists of all time.

Publications

1951. ''Quantum Theory'', New York: Prentice Hall. 1989 reprint, New York: Dover, ISBN 0-486-65969-0

1957. ''Causality and Chance in Modern Physics'', 1961 Harper edition reprinted in 1980 by Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, ISBN 0-8122-1002-6

1962. ''Quanta and Reality, A Symposium'', with N. R. Hanson and Mary B. Hesse, from a BBC program published by the American Research Council

1965. ''The Special Theory of Relativity'', New York: W.A. Benjamin.

1980. ''Wholeness and the Implicate Order'', London: Routledge, ISBN 0-7100-0971-2, 1983 Ark paperback: ISBN 0-7448-0000-5, 2002 paperback: ISBN 0-415-28979-3

1985. ''Unfolding Meaning: A weekend of dialogue with David Bohm'' (Donald Factor, editor), Gloucestershire: Foundation House, ISBN 0-948325-00-3, 1987 Ark paperback: ISBN 0-7448-0064-1, 1996 Routledge paperback: ISBN 0-415-13638-5

1985. ''The Ending of Time'', with Jiddu Krishnamurti, San Francisco, CA: Harper, ISBN 0-06-064796-5.

1987. ''Science, Order, and Creativity'', with F. David Peat. London: Routledge. 2nd ed. 2000. ISBN 0-415-17182-2.

1989. ''Meaning And Information'', In: P. Pylkkänen (ed.): ''The Search for Meaning: The New Spirit in Science and Philosophy'', Crucible, The Aquarian Press, 1989, ISBN 978-1852740610.

1991. ''Changing Consciousness: Exploring the Hidden Source of the Social, Political and Environmental Crises Facing our World'' (a dialogue of words and images), coauthor Mark Edwards, Harper San Francisco, ISBN 0-06-250072-4

1992. ''Thought as a System'' (transcript of seminar held in Ojai, California, from 30 November to 2 December 1990), London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-11980-4.

1993. ''The Undivided Universe: An ontological interpretation of quantum theory'', with B.J. Hiley, London: Routledge, ISBN 0-415-12185-X (final work)

1996. ''On Dialogue''. editor Lee Nichol. London: Routledge, hardcover: ISBN 0-415-14911-8, paperback: ISBN 0-415-14912-6, 2004 edition: ISBN 0-415-33641-4

1998. ''On Creativity'', editor Lee Nichol. London: Routledge, hardcover: ISBN 0-415-17395-7, paperback: ISBN 0-415-17396-5, 2004 edition: ISBN 0-415-33640-6

1999. ''Limits of Thought: Discussions'', with Jiddu Krishnamurti, London: Routledge, ISBN 0-415-19398-2.

1999. ''Bohm-Biederman Correspondence: Creativity and Science'', with Charles Biederman. editor Paavo Pylkkänen. ISBN 0-415-16225-4.

2002. ''The Essential David Bohm''. editor Lee Nichol. London: Routledge, ISBN 0-415-26174-0. preface by the Dalai Lama

See also

American philosophy

Implicate and explicate order according to David Bohm

Penrose-Hameroff "Orchestrated Objective Reduction" theory of consciousness

The Bohm sheath criterion, which states that a plasma must flow with at least the speed of sound toward a solid surface

Karl Pribram

Influence on John David Garcia

List of American philosophers

References

"Bohm's Alternative to Quantum Mechanics", David Z. Albert, ''Scientific American'' (May, 1994)

''Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller'', Herken, Gregg, New York: Henry Holt (2002) ISBN 0-8050-6589-X (information on Bohm's work at Berkeley and his dealings with HUAC)

''Infinite Potential: the Life and Times of David Bohm'', F. David Peat, Reading, MA: Addison Wesley (1997), ISBN 0-201-40635-7 DavidPeat.com

''Quantum Implications: Essays in Honour of David Bohm'', (B.J. Hiley, F. David Peat, editors), London: Routledge (1987), ISBN 0-415-06960-2

''Thought as a System'' (transcript of seminar held in Ojai, California, from 30 November to 2 December 1990), London: Routledge. (1992) ISBN 0-415-11980-4.

''The Quantum Theory of Motion: an account of the de Broglie-Bohm Causal Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics'', Peter R. Holland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2000) ISBN 0-921-48453-9.

External links

David Bohm's ideas about Dialogue.

the David_Bohm_Hub. Includes compilations of David Bohm's life and work in form of texts, audio, video, and pictures.

Thought Knowledge Perception Institute A non-partisan organization that aims to preserve and continue the work of David Bohm and others.

Lifework of David Bohm: River of Truth: Article by Will Keepin (PDF-version)

Dialogos: Consulting group, originally founded by Bohm colleagues William Isaacs and Peter Garrett, aiming to bring Bohm dialogue into organizations.

quantum mind

Interview with David Bohm provided and conducted by F. David Peat along with John Briggs, first issued in ''Omni'' magazine, January 1987

David Bohm and Krishnamurti

Archive of papers at Birkbeck College relating to David Bohm and David Bohm at the National Archives

Quantum-Mind

Oral History interview transcript with David Bohm 8 May 1981, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives

William Keepin:

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