Yeah, I mentioned that but it was pretty offhand since I added it in later, even though one of the article links really drives the point home. Oppenheimer wasn't like "I'll hang out with the leftists" in college, he was a commie until the end and probably helped the Soviets build the bomb. He even got Einstein to not be allowed to join the Manhattan Project because Einstein occasionally posted in one of those tame democratic socialist magazines (not even ancom) sometimes but Oppenheimer himself was what lots of people today would call "tankie." Remove the plank from your own eye before you try to remove the speck from someone else's much? He died with a plank in his eye and he won't be missed.
I'm not in the habit of commenting on things so beyond my level of competency, but as someone with a long-standing fascination with Bohm's work (both as an "outlaw" physicist and for holonomic brain theory), this article raised a couple of questions for me.
For the longest time, Bohm was held by the physics orthodoxy in disregard, if not outright disdain. However, wasn't that the whole point of the Bell tests? Instead of being blithely hand-waved away, Bohm's nonlocal hidden variable interpretation of quantum mechanics was finally taken seriously and rigorously tested. Unfortunately (for those of us with a philosophical axe to grind), the result was that Bohm's theory was disproven. Do I have that wrong? It definitely would make a better movie if I've got that wrong!
The other concern that I have is with Bohm's flirtation with Marxism. You characterize it as "a short while", but my understanding is that he didn't make a break from Communism until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 (Olival Freire Junior, 2019; David Bohm: A Life Dedicated to Understanding the Quantum World). If accurate, that puts Bohm close to 40 years old. I don't bring that up as a condemnation of Bohm, but just to be even-handed towards Oppenheimer (even if he doesn't deserve it) and in the spirit of Bohmian Dialogue.
And a Red.
Yeah, I mentioned that but it was pretty offhand since I added it in later, even though one of the article links really drives the point home. Oppenheimer wasn't like "I'll hang out with the leftists" in college, he was a commie until the end and probably helped the Soviets build the bomb. He even got Einstein to not be allowed to join the Manhattan Project because Einstein occasionally posted in one of those tame democratic socialist magazines (not even ancom) sometimes but Oppenheimer himself was what lots of people today would call "tankie." Remove the plank from your own eye before you try to remove the speck from someone else's much? He died with a plank in his eye and he won't be missed.
I'm not in the habit of commenting on things so beyond my level of competency, but as someone with a long-standing fascination with Bohm's work (both as an "outlaw" physicist and for holonomic brain theory), this article raised a couple of questions for me.
For the longest time, Bohm was held by the physics orthodoxy in disregard, if not outright disdain. However, wasn't that the whole point of the Bell tests? Instead of being blithely hand-waved away, Bohm's nonlocal hidden variable interpretation of quantum mechanics was finally taken seriously and rigorously tested. Unfortunately (for those of us with a philosophical axe to grind), the result was that Bohm's theory was disproven. Do I have that wrong? It definitely would make a better movie if I've got that wrong!
The other concern that I have is with Bohm's flirtation with Marxism. You characterize it as "a short while", but my understanding is that he didn't make a break from Communism until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 (Olival Freire Junior, 2019; David Bohm: A Life Dedicated to Understanding the Quantum World). If accurate, that puts Bohm close to 40 years old. I don't bring that up as a condemnation of Bohm, but just to be even-handed towards Oppenheimer (even if he doesn't deserve it) and in the spirit of Bohmian Dialogue.