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.
David Bohm Quotes
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| Birth: | 20th December, 1917 |
| Death: | 27th October, 1992 |
| Nationality: | American |
| Profession: | Physicist |
About
Bohm was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, United States, to a Hungarian Jewish immigrant father and a Lithuanian Jewish mother. Bohm attended Pennsylvania State College, 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.
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 director of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves, would not approve Bohm's security clearance, after evidence about his politics. Bohm remained in Berkeley, teaching physics, until he completed his Ph.D. in 1943, by an unusually ironic circumstance. According to Peat, "the scattering calculations 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.
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.
David Bohm died after suffering a heart attack in Hendon, London, on 27 October 1992, aged 74.
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