Basil J. Hiley, quantum collaborator with David Bohm, gives new interview on music and mind

 new Basil J. Hiley interview on Noncommutative quantum algebra Mind and Music

Reality Unfolding - a Conversation on Bohmian Physics with Prof. Basil hiley 450 views May 10, 2021 21 0 Share Save Science & Wisdom LIVE Professor Basil Hiley, one of the foremost theoretical physicists of our time, enters in conversation with Scott Snibbe on the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics and his collaboration with David Bohm. 

In today’s episode of Science & Wisdom LIVE, they will discuss: - The paradox of quantum mechanics and wave/particle duality - Multiple interpretations of quantum mechanics: the standard interpretation, the multiverse and the quantum potential - Bohm’s interpretation and the subtle action of the quantum potential - Testing Bohm’s hypothesis experimentally - Quantum processes are not mechanical but organic - Implicate and explicate order and the nature of minds - The creation of new concepts and process-oriented language - Why ‘there is no particle, there is just process’. - The role of observers and measurements in quantum mechanics - How the quantum potential can bridge individual and collective - Why we “can’t control nature, and if you think you can you’re going to cause disasters” - Avoiding fragmentation: a wholistic approach to problem-solving - Group dynamics and super systems 5 

 Transcript welcome to science and wisdom live where scientists and meditators meet well professor Hiley you've you've kindly mentioned that i can call you basil so that will be the last time i used your honorific that you're greatly deserving of and i i really enjoyed your passionate presence in the infinite potential movie so i'm excited to get a chance to ask you some questions here today thanks a lot for joining us it's a pleasure and i hope i can keep some interest going in this subject but let's try far away yeah i'm sure i believe you have some questions for me yeah yeah i'm sure you'll i think the challenge will be um getting through the stack of questions 

i'd love to ask you but we'll get to to many good ones i'm sure so i wanted to start by asking you about the invisible aspects of reality which is really kind of everything that physics talks about today you know modern physics describes this some more fundamental invisible reality that underlies the world as we perceive it and what i wanted to ask you about is if in buddhism and in other contemplative traditions there's also a view of an invisible reality that's more fundamental than what our senses tell us do you see these underlying realities of contemplation and science related in any way 

interesting question for me the what quantum mechanics presented that presented me with was the fact that somehow you had to accept things which seemed to be totally contradictory and then when you try to penetrate below them the uh voices of authority like niels bohr would say pictures are not possible therefore immediately one says well i'm sorry i'm a bad boy i don't like being told it's not possible unless i can understand why it is not possible now uh is so so what i was interested in as an even as an undergraduate was what the hell is going on why are we presented with this seemingly abstract formalism without uh and yet keeping the the classical picture we're taught the classical picture until we we're sick of it and then we're suddenly told when we come to quantum mechanics oh drop all that it's totally different and there is this as you said seemingly invisible underlying reality now so my my interest in that was just to ask questions about that when i was an undergraduate i was told that oh for goodness sake stop asking those questions just get on and learn what we're teaching you and everything will be fine well i was not very happy with that as you can imagine but then i i managed to uh to perform the tricks they asked us to perform as undergraduates and even postgraduates and i had some very interesting work in postgraduate work when i was working with cyril dom uh on the icing model on collective phenomena and it began to show me that underlying this phenomena there is something which is tangible so you see i'm not going down the buddhist point of view i'm just saying look this is a problem for me i don't understand what is going on i think that's the basic point uh i'm told that we have to have this current contradiction of wave particle duality and i don't understand why and it's not it doesn't make sense it's not at all clear but then i must tell you that i actually grew up in india so i have as it were imbibed the indian tradition or the far eastern tradition uh by experiencing it not intellectually but by experiencing it with with with sight with sounds and of course with smells as well one mustn't forget the far east is not exactly exotic and smell free but the whole way that the indian society was organized was something that was uh very much apparent to me so i if you like must have imbibed some of the eastern tradition and although i don't look for answers in the eastern tradition i certainly respect what they try to do and buddhism in particular is something that i am no expert in but i've always kept an eye on the discussions that go on in that particular area so i would say i'm aware of both of them but i'm not sure that my physics has been influenced very much by that tradition except perhaps by osmosis yeah were you president for some of the meetings with his holiness the dalai lama mind i never met the dalai lama no but i i was in the presence of meetings with bohm and krishnamurti and i once horrified david bone because i went to the school christian woody had a school at brockwood park in in hampshire and i went to school in hampshire after i'd returned from india and so i know that area very well and i rather and one of the teachers of that school happened to be someone i was at school with and we played soccer together and david bone came out one day when i was there on an intellectual business and saw me running up and down the right wing and wondered what the hell i was doing but but that just shows how unorthodox i am i should have been discussing these very deep problems but no i was on the right wing chasing a lump of leather well can

can i ask you over the course of your your career asking this question about the fundamental nature of reality you know whether an interpretation of those equations and not just the equations as a way of solving problems can you describe that in any way that an ordinary audience would understand what is this more fundamental aspect of reality 

um i'm just can i show some transparencies just to get people because i do a lot like for me the visualization is very important i think if it's helpful yeah sure okay so if i can get the get some uh i got some transparencies uh which i would like to because i didn't quite know how this um how this how how we were going to organize this talk can you say there you go yeah yeah i see it that was just dude just okay good well that was just to start with but then you see what puzzled me so much was really i've already told you i'm very interested in sport so i'm looking at quantum mechanics and saying all right how do i play quantum squash well i've i've got a ball i've got a racket and i hit it against the wall and i keep hitting it and of course if i'm playing with ordinary classical it'll come back again but if i'm playing quantum squash occasionally the ball will disappear and go through the wall and then you say well yeah how is what what's going on there this is this is ridiculous then of course you've got the classic interference when a particle behaves as if it's a wave and what you find is that it's a very funny wave because you slowly build up the particles arriving at the screen until here you've got very few going through it's only when you get a few hundred million going through that you begin to see the fringes which are the interference pattern and in fact we 

i'm so disbelieving that we actually did in the laboratory at ucl actually use argon atoms and build a movie out of the argon atoms arriving at our detector and forming the fringe pattern so this is not something just abstract it's something we can actually do in the laboratory and i think that this i was very pleased with this i i have to this these these dots you're seeing here are actually argon atoms and this movie was made by joel morley i hope i've got the right now it's either him or vincenzo um and i think it's joel morley who did this uh quite beautiful and we are doing this because we want to explore whether some of the things that boehm said would work are going to work now just to have a look at the difference between random scattering which is this bourne's machine gun it's called i don't know where i got this picture from but it shows that if you've got one slit open you get that if you close that and open the other slit and when you open both of them you get two lumps but if you do the same thing with a ripple tank you find instead of getting two lumps you get this interference effect and now you use the electron gun i've i've just shown you a live argon gun you find that when you open the two slits you get this so the question is what is the relation between the individual the particle arriving and this collective behavior because what it's saying is that if i have both slits open my particle will get to a point on the screen whereas if i close one of them it will never get to that point so how does this single particle the individual know that it has to respond to the collective behavior even though there's no other particles present at all 

 okay well then the way we have taught to do it it's just saying oh look we've got a wave here so let's find the simplest way to explain it well we simply have got an amplitude which is the height of the wave and it is modulated by a phase so let's just say okay let's represent the particle by a wave function with an amplitude and a phase sorry this i got to be very careful i touch the ipad and the whole thing changes too quickly i'm sorry about that and then so what we then find is well the amplitude is actually r squared when we see the height of it because this can't be positive and negative the amplitude as you can see from this picture here and we interpret that as being the probability of finding the particle at that point so now we've changed from something a system going through to a probability of it arriving at a particular point and then we say one more feature if that was all we wouldn't be very excited but then what de Broglie noticed was that if you uh take a stationary state with the energy you actually get an equation which you can solve and to give you discrete energy levels and one of the things that we see in the laboratory is uh looking at light going through a prism is we see these line spectra and these line spectra actually give you the correct uh results of of the Bohr theory using h equals um e equals h nu so somehow there's a very comp and this is very easy to do this is something that nowadays a computer does in a couple of seconds so it's a brilliant way of doing the algorithm and then let's have a look at the the quantum squash represent the ball by a wave packet now it comes up against the barrier and then it does this alarming jiggery pokery here and then what happens is let it go on a little bit longer and then you finally find sometimes a bit of the packet comes this way a bit of the packet goes through but also a bit of the packet remains inside the wall 

so that's what the the schrodinger equation is telling us happens come on man what the hell is going on well and then of course you get the ultimate which is schrodinger's cat where if you give the cat away function put him in a box and then you become an assassin and let photons go through here which triggers a device which breaks what is the cyanide gas i think it is and either if if the photon goes through it kills it if it doesn't go through the cat's alive so the process actually occurs here but we've got this stage we cannot tell whether the cat is alive or dead and people say because of the linear combination psi one being alive side dead side two being dead if you add those to the linear combination you have to take seriously in quantum mechanics and this schrodinger actually mentioned this paradox hopeful hopefully that people would wake up okay but no it's sort of become accepted and oh yes that's the way nature behaves okay and can i ask a question about that some people are obviously i think people probably don't understand the equations you know just like me but we've heard some of these conventions and um we could probably stop the screen share too so we can see um basil but i want to ask you a question yeah sure oh yeah that's great nice to see you but 

i want to ask you a question about that because you know my lay understanding of this is that there are a couple different interpretations of quantum mechanics one is that this probabilistic cloud of possibilities gets collapsed when we make a measure of measurement or an observation and then there's another interpretation too i've heard that multiple universes are forking every single time that there's that probabilistic cloud so that every single possibility manifests now in your work do you and david bohm's interpretation is yours a third interpretation or some other interview 

yes it's it's a it's a it's a different interpretation and i was just coming on to that but um but thank you for stopping me because you know sometimes i talk away and people are not following and i'd much rather people follow me no thank you so much now so what i was going to now say is is there any alternatives yeah and then what we find is yes there is and the one i was going to go for was the bone interpretation it's interesting that i once wrote a paper illustrating the various interpretations very early on in my career and rudolph piles was the referee and said to me what is this man talking about there is only one interpretation of quantum mechanics so in the very early days there was all there was this belief that there was only there was one and only one and that was the one that Bohr had given us so the guys who grow up now find hundreds of interpretations i would almost say whereas in the day that we were working it was sorry i'm having a little trouble with my screen it's all right i've suddenly solved the problem okay um this is the trouble with technology you can't see me beavering away here trying to get back and see you guys again because i forgot for the minute how it worked i'm not as uh adept at using these technologies that you guys that the younger guys 

no it's okay so continue what is the the bohmian interpretation yeah okay so then now yeah please somebody wants to ask a question oh no i think we'll continue well in about 20 minutes we'll open up to outside questions

 okay so let me just i got as far as i got as far as this and can you see it yeah yeah and i just want to go on to this this right okay now we're nowhere so what i was trying to get there to get out there was and i'm well aware of the fact that i'm talking to people who are not familiar with the equations but unfortunately i'm trying to make the equations see where they come from what are the ideas lying behind them i don't expect you to solve the damn things i mean you know we have enough trouble trying to solve the damn things but i'm just trying to illustrate that it seemed to me that they had an easy way out oh i can explain waves if i assume there is a wave function for the particle now that has been changed into a religion that is this is the state of the particle and it is not and that's what lies behind all these different interpretations that's a different point of view again okay but what david was doing don't forget this is david bowman's interpretation i'm talking about now you see uh here i'm telling you i was telling you earlier about boar's insistence there are no pictures you can't see what underlies this there are no pictures um and he's got statements to back that up and uh we are dealing with implications for which defies unambiguous expression in words suited to be dis to suited to describe classical physics time and time again he's more or less telling us give up mate came into it at this level because Bohm's 52 paper i joined in 61 so it's just 10 years and there was still all this opposition and remember poor david was exiled to to south america etc etc with the mccarthy business okay and 

we only have the mathematics and then there came a tradition in physics oh for god's sake stop talking about this just do it just calculate and you know okay well why do we want to count anyway but we know what algorithms do algorithms can if you want to try and interpret algorithms you can get into all sorts of nonsense with it right so what did david do david just said look if i split the schrodinger equation into its real and imaginary parts i get a real equation just look at the pattern don't doesn't matter what it means if i go to the classical theory i've got exactly the same pattern but look there's a term missing there's a term missing you see and if i uh identify these s's which i can justify they come out through momentum with wavelengths remember energy was frequency these are related to that and then you've got this extra term and it seems as if the whole of the quantum theory comes about because of the appearance of this extra term and this is the quantum potential that paul howard was talking about had nauseum in the film and chris jude and these little pictures to show you how it worked so now we're saying all right but if we look at the schrodinger equation it becomes very simple 

it's just the conservation of energy this is the total energy this is the kinetic energy this is the classical potential energy and this is a new quality of energy this mysterious energy feynman refers to it as a mysterious energy then everybody forgets about it and in fact when i went to conferences they said we don't need it i said sorry you do because do you believe in conservation of energy yes and therefore we've got this new what is it doing and this is the difference between our inter our i'm sorry do you mind me calling it our interpretation it's actually certainly it's actually if it values interpretation yeah but our interpretation is let's try to understand what the hell this potential is because it's going to tell us something about reality reality is not the way we thought it was the way the classical world emerges we've got this extra mysterious quality of energy and to me

 it's very much like the analogy i wanted to use was a formula one you see how i waste my time formula one grand prix racing cars a few years ago they introduced the kers system it's a kinetic energy retrieval system the idea is to save energy instead of letting the brakes dissipate the energy through heat you make it charge up a battery so that when you take the brakes off again you've got energy restored and you can go like hell well this quantum potential energy is very much like like that here's the kinetic energy some of it is stored as a quantum potential energy and then when you get the free particle again that energy is fed into the kinetic energy and it goes bang like hell okay so you really got a nice little model if you take it seriously and then you get this picture for the slits and the interference pattern you see here's the interference pad and these are individual trajectories and this is the ensemble which produces the individual uh pattern and this is impossible according to Bohr we could not do this according to Bohr i'm sorry we've done it and this is what chris dudeny chris philippedes who were my research students and i said well look we've got computers now why don't you go and calculate these things and this is what they did and then of course you see here's the corner potential look at it isn't it glorious here's the slits in the background and you've got oh

 i thought now they will all take notice of what we're doing but they just smiled and walked on and then if you want to see how the tennis ball works or the quantum squash ball works here are the trajectories they here you're hitting it against the wall here's the wall some of them are going through look the ones that some of them are remaining and some of them are coming out so we actually can reproduce completely what quantum mechanics is telling us by saving some of the classical ideas but we've got to worry about what do we mean by the quantum potential but before i go on that was the state until 2011 and the problem was we couldn't do experiments to verify those trajectories and then therefore everybody was saying hey you're not an experimental physicist and up comes the photon trajectories steinberg and his group there they are kosh et cetera et cetera et cetera at toronto produce something which if you compare it well okay it doesn't look the same but these are photons and these are argon atoms but come on this is experimental physics and and there's a lot of errors in here no error bars shown but it looks as if one's in the right ballpark 

so does this quantum potential interpretation make a different prediction? no we make absolutely no different predictions but it tells it begins to give you an insight into the reality that may be lying behind things yeah 

so could you tell us what what is what are the the philosophical or you know reality implications of this interpretation?

 yeah one of the ideas let me i'll come off the screen now okay yeah uh one of the ideas that we had that i discussed with david bone was the following first of all if you look at the quantum potential and we did lots of examples i mean you know the computers went mad this was when computers were almost friendly nowadays you can do all this stuff in about five minutes flat if you're if you're proficient at computing okay so what what we found then was uh that the quantum potential it works in every situation everybody said oh yes i can see you'll work here but if you do it it won't work for that then we did it for that and it's all that's interesting but it won't work for this so then we went into that and it got a bit boring in the end but we learned a lot about the quantum potential and the quantum potential is nothing like a classical potential classical potentials usually drop off the further you get away from the thing that's causing the potential the weaker it gets quantum potential doesn't do that it's an entirely different type of potential it's got the amplitude in the denominator which means that the amplitude can be very small but the potential can be very big so this is where david Peat talks about the subtle force okay but it's all coming from this one model now then uh the next thing is okay okay but so what is it doing well then david bowm had the idea well maybe it's changing the form of the trajectories in a subtle way not in a push-pull way which is what um this is 

this is going back to the aristotelian ideas of causality i think he had four causes didn't he the material caused the efficient cause the formative cause and and the material cause and physics has got rid of everything except the efficient course now what the quantum potential is doing seemingly we thought was to bring back the formative cause and then i said well if you if you're then talking about the uh but what is what goes into the form it's the information about the experimental conditions about the slip width about the how wide they are how fast separated there so you're feeding in information into this quantum potential which is then feeding it into the individual particle so the individual particle going through one hole will know the other hole is open because the information is being supplied by this quantum potential so this quantum potential is the way of handling the global features the collective features of the problem and 

would would the quantum potential require uh instantaneous communication between points in space?

 would that be a feature this is why we've got we do have to change things very dramatically because let me tell you i'm now at the position that david bone was in in 1958 because he was very much against mechanism what i'm doing now is telling you how you would understand this in terms of a mechanism yeah and you've immediately asked the question what is the mechanical notions behind the quantum potential there isn't one there's an entirely different type of the nearest i've got to it which was i discovered only just recently was that it's the type of force that actually creates vortices and they are let me say the way an aircraft has its lift is the relation between the fast flow of the air over the top and the soft flow underneath causes a force so it's actually flow is causing a force and this is very different from anything that we've got in in the mechanical world but it appears in einstein's general theory of relativity i don't know whether how many people are aware of this einstein certainly was because he mentions it in a paper and this type of

 so they're now going to be a different type of uh of geometry it's not geometry but it's ferometry not photometry but ferometry now that word was in the english language at the in the 1880s and earlier but it dropped out and but einstein realized it was already in his theory so we've got something coming in here now you can see my interest that there's something already that Bohm has spotted which is of this quality yeah and therefore you can see the excitement coming in and

 does this relate to Bohm's ideas of wholeness? 

or implications the wholeness is the quality the quantum potential essentially contains the information of the whole the whole experimental arrangement but it's contained in a way which is which can feed a point particle because that's where the end the total energy is being conserved so if you like the particle is slowing down like a formula one as it coming up to the two slits because it has to have energy feeling the environment i'm sorry i'm i'm being organic i don't know how else to describe it 

anthropomorphic 

yeah yeah and then it all gets put back again into the energy finally when it hits the screen and we record it because we we see the whole energy energy nowhere is not conserved here and energy is the thing that is non-local and we already know that in gravitational waves energy cannot be localized gravitational energy cannot be localized so this is this strange phenomena that david Bohm got in the 50s has indications elsewhere that we've really got to take this non-locality seriously

 so at the time there was this theory was dismissed at least according to the the film you know where i learned this information this theory was dismissed um for in some ways because it couldn't be you know proved or disproved but my understanding is is now you have some experiments underway that could validate the theory?

 is that yes that was the the the pictures that i put up on the last slide those were for photons and photons are very different from helium atoms they've got different properties and in fact they shouldn't okay i'm not going into that it's a technical problem for physicists not for philosophers and what we decided to do what what the toronto experiment did was to show that you could use the formalism to measure these things locally they're called weak measurements and so what we are trying to do is use weak measurements to work on the helium atoms and actually try to construct the trajectories in the same way unfortunately we've been stopped for a year because of it but we're now working on it again and we're getting pretty close to be able to to see whether we are successful or not and the 

the experiment would have a different result if the quantum potential is in effect versus another interpretation of quantum issues?

no it's showing that there is a change of there's some there's a different signature that we can get when we push the laser it's when we push a laser beam through it we've got some variant uh peter barker has been absolutely marvelous on this um in in the suggestion and the group the whole group there's a whole group at ucl who are now getting very involved in this and if we've got the thing correct we will be able to see something which would not be expected to see on the conventional theory 

is there is a way to say what i'm so excited about this and you talked about in the movie too so this is the the late breaking information i was hoping to get from you is there a way to say in lay terms what that difference would be it's okay if there isn't?

 you know you see something you see we're not supposed to say anything about what happens between the slits and the screen remember yeah but we can actually construct the momentum we can actually draw little vector diagrams and we can construct the trajectories with this new method of dealing with things  

by constructing mean measure actually measure you can actually measure and then through the measurements construct the trajectories i see so the trajectories would be different with the quantum potential?

 there wouldn't be any no with without the quantum potential there would be no trajectories at all no trajectories at all oh okay so i okay i think i think we slightly understand this now thank you for explaining that i'm excited when will we get some results when will these results be available um can i tell the story then so far because then you'd be interested this is sure uh we were dealing with it just before covid and that's when joel morley's experiments of the dot because we've we've got the we've got the argon atoms doing what we want them to do now we've got to get in between the detector and the source and my idea was that we do this field um i discussed it with rob flack and we said 

oh let's build the electromagnetic field out of magnets and currents and and peter barker says it's never going to work but it's never going to work and then he came up with a very very intriguing idea that you can use the magnetic field in the laser in the photons in the laser and i please i can't explain it to you because i don't have a very simple picture of it but it's a very cunning trick where you push an atom up pull it down again and by the difference in that you can actually measure the momentum 

yeah like an electron microscope or something like that?

 it's now it's even more complicated it's much more subtle than that i'm sorry i can't that's okay well we'll look forward to hearing the results well what we haven't done yet is to show that it's going to work so please don't get me you know i'm excited because it's work working progress if it works out well then everybody will be objecting no you're not doing that you're doing something else but we want to see a signature and i think if we see a signature there will be a sudden change in everything that they said about the the Bohm theory yeah i'm almost convinced about it 

well that's it your your excitement was palpable in the movie and and here's still so i think it's 

i'm sorry i just i get excited you know it's great i 

i have another question for you it's slightly tangential but you david bowman you haven't been afraid to touch on this territory of what the relationship is between mind and matter uh i think david bohm wrote about this in you know undivided universe and could you talk a little bit about that video?

can i come in because one of the things you were saying well how can i understand this and i started talking about not being mechanical but being organic so if i get onto the organ the organic part of it i want to go onto an organ if i get under the organic part of it then maybe you'll see how it can be developing out into a possibility i'm i'm always a bit hesitant here because i'm not a guy who is very happy to talk about too much about consciousness because i don't know what the hell it is but let me tell you how i was coming into it and then maybe we can discuss whether this is something or not so can i take the screen again 

yes sure

 thanks okay so then to highlight this i was going to say you see boom is very much against mechanics and please let me get it clear to people who see a bastard called bohmian mechanics out there when i showed this paper to to boom he said haven't they read anything i've written? and very early on he says quantum mechanic oh sorry i'm not doing this properly quantum mechanics is a misnomer it should be called non-mechanics and in fact quantum processes are organic so already we're beginning to say that maybe this is where we can get into biology and and then in this sense we're looking at it in terms of whitehead but the concrete enduring entities are organisms so the plan of the whole influences sorry i can't read the uh what about oh god sorry i'm 

i'm trying to get rid of the windows on top of it yeah influence i can see the characters of the various subordinate subordinate organisms which enter into it and then if you so what you're doing then is you're saying and this is bone parts of it work together now i've done it again you know in the interaction is more or less sorry the part you can read this yeah the parts work together in interaction and i've got this quite simple i'm not very good at moving this wretched picture of mine sorry now i've got to go why isn't it going back okay right now i can see this yeah so then it's a the whole point is it develops and still can't see how can i get rid of this bloody picture three i beg your pardon i hope i didn't offend anybody with that excellent expletive but i'm frustrated but could we not see it we can we can actually see and read yeah so the whole point is that it's the organism as a whole so it's not the parts which constitute the whole it's the hole which conditions the individuals so you don't abstract out particle and put it together with other particles to build a picture the particle is an invariant feature of the total process and when you say organism do you mean something that's alive and living organic in the sense of whitehead like the parts depend upon the behavior of the whole and not the parts giving an explanation of the whole 

it's about causality

 yeah yeah our mechanical world is always we get the parts first and then we put them together and we see how it works quantum mechanics screams at us no and therefore we must change our view of reality and this is the important point about changing our view reality to get in to see how mind works 

okay that's great this this might be a good time to open up to some of the questions from people yeah sure sure sure sure let me come off the screen again yeah we have i have plenty more but i think the audience would love to love to you know 

i'm pleased i'm entirely in your hands 

great so do we have any anyone would like to ask a question if you want to you can raise your hand using the reaction feature or uh oh yeah you want do we want to start with said and marco okay well 

thank you so much scott and basil for this conversation it's opened so many very interesting questions but i i would maybe like to start with a question of a more personal nature i wonder professor hailey you clearly have a very deep insight into this fundamental level of reality that you have acquired through research through your expertise of mathematics but i was wondering if somehow this process of doing research on this fundamental level and this big question has also changed your inner world and the way you look at things and experience itself

i i people always ask me that but i say no because it's the way i've always been thinking about how things should be i mean this is coming from within me the feelings and the formulae are just sort of well they're they're they're the this is where Bohm's implicate

order becomes so very important for me because they are merely the explicit orders what what we see with the mathematics so there's something underlying that and that's the implicat order but it's in all of life when i want to talk about something some difficult subject i have feelings movements in my brain and i am trying to articulate them so i'm responding to an implicat order and i'm trying to make to get it out to make it an explicit order and that process somehow gets in the way because not everything can be made explicit at the same time that's one of the big lessons you have learned from quantum mechanics which i haven't really touched upon so far and that's what's known as the uncertainty principle but it's not uncertainty in the sense of being ham-fisted and hitting it not being able to measure it properly it doesn't actually exist in that form so when you're talking about the position

 the particle doesn't have any momentum implic implicitly sorry explicitly but there is a implic in implicit structure which i can change from the position to the momentum the momentum to the position the best way of looking at that psychologically is with the gestalts you know the old lady young lady those diagrams well that to me the diagram is the implicat order only my implicat order is algebraic but if you want to translate it into symbols it's the lines and then the way we interpret the lines is whether we create the old lady or the young lady 

yes so you're referring to those images that can be looked at depending on which way one looks at them one can see either a certain image like a young lady or a different an old lady and both images are there at the same time but it's impossible for a human brain to perceive those

 but more imp more important it's in the brain there already the order is in the brain you're trying to make it explicit come on you you struggle with words trying to explain something yes yeah what are you doing what is that struggle 

conversation is a way of trying to make explicat what's implicated in the inner world of every one of us

 yes i mean it's so obvious why why do people say it's something mysterious we we're practicing it every ruddy day of our lives and what is happening is that we're we try to get that implicat order idea out of physics this is why i think quantum mechanics the view that it gives of reality from the way i'm approaching it gives us a chance of seeing how the mind works because where is the eye in the mind saying oh look what i am doing you have to have another eye looking at the eye of the eye that's doing to do it and you get into an infinite regress so that already you've got this now 

one of the hopes that we had was that we can one of the hopes that i had because i'm not sure about david Bohm this i'm speaking for myself completely no and that is i was hoping that some of these mathematical features because to me mathematics is just explication of structural ideas and i'm hoping and i'm not the only one who's doing that because grassmann really brought my attention to it now have you heard of grassmann some people have some people haven't 

he was very profound on the influence of mathematics at the turn of the 1890s to 1900. 

no i haven't i haven't heard of him 

oh golly you say what do we do without this history because he is the man who was uh he thought mathematics was about thought it was not about material process whereas we have been brought up to say that mathematics well first of all it's so mysterious that we've put 90 percent of the population off it and i never know why but it is just merely a language of expressing these ideas so has it has this way no i've just developed what was already in me i could see this already being there this implicant structure was already there david Bohm just crystallized it for me and so with in fact it it it it set me free in a way because then i wasn't i wasn't trapped what everybody else says i must be doing because i know so what's going on in here is diff is 

what they're struggling with and when they say you must do this no no that's just one extra order i'm sorry it's difficult to actually get this across but uh 

i think that gives us a taste of that that translation from the implicate to the explicit both as um seeming particles manifesting from waves and as uh words manifesting from you know thought and experience

 and music and also in music you actually you anticipate you've got a the memory of the past anticipating the future and that is a bus inside you so you are actually experiencing the implicat order directly through music 

 that's a great example yeah music's that if you're really aware you know those first second or two you're listening to music it's kind of nonsense and then it eventually all of a sudden coheres right into into something because you have to have the temporal pattern to make sense of it right and 

do you know how you introduced the word ferometry if you ask anybody in musicology department they will tell you what it means and what would they say well it's it's movements without everything anything being kicked in the backside why do you have movements in your in your symphonies because there's a different way of perceiving this idea 

yeah that's a great metaphor let's uh let's go to another question with kamlo hello hi professor and thank you scott and say and marco this has been like really cool so my question is um in in your slide one of the quotes from bomb said um that there is uh this kind of innate ambiguity in in in in our descriptions of quantum physics and it seems that the results give rise to these paradoxes which kind of jar with our our you know everyday experience of reality and so i guess my question is what what what would do you think the limitations of language held back the interpret the the progress in in interpreting quantum physics it's a two-part question so there's that and then the second part is do you think you know physics undergraduates would benefit from a philosophical education okay would that help their their physic their work in physics their research

 okay remind me of the second part because i have a very bad memory when i'm thinking all sorts of funny things happen now what we came into this with saying why has Bohr adopted this position uh and in fact some people say that he said we're trapped in language 

but really it's the question of concepts can we create new concepts which is not necessarily about language now concept creation is something which is which is very difficult i'm always impressed by the appearance of the zero in mathematics i mean that's a that was an indian invention isn't it it is an indian invention yes i'm sorry to be praising the indians and it was because they were using stones to count and they were using it on in on a dust and if you've been to india and grew up in india you know exactly what that means because i used to play marbles there i go again confessing all these things i played and the marbles actually left traces so that when you pulled it out of the dust there was the zero so now that how does that concept then get taken from that observation and suddenly a concept is formed and your language is transformed from the concept 

so we spent a long time um worrying about concept formation it's a long time ago and i can't remember all the things we went through but the other thing was we were trying to develop a language which was process orientated because our language is always i'll take a cup from a cupboard i'll fill it with water we're always dealing with objects and filling it with water doesn't really interest us it's the it's the object that we've got and so we where we're always thinking in terms of object so we're thinking of the particle as an object but it's not an object in that sense

 try to find out where is the solidity of the particle well it's in the atoms no it's not the atoms electrons and nuclei it's in the nucleus no it's not the neutrons and protons it's in the neutrons and no it's not and then you find the protons are made of quarks valence quarks but only two percent of white valence crop all the rest is this sea of quarks being created and annihilated so where is the solidity it isn't there it's the illusion of course if we try to hit these things and you know you're not you're gonna you're gonna feel the wall if you put your head against it but that's because we're dealing with the many body system where stability has been established

 but in the very fundamental there is no particle there is just process hmm yeah 

you know my understanding of the sanskrit language too is that uh nouns are verbs so if you don't say self you say selfing

 yeah yeah we went through uh david Bohm actually wrote a paper on he called it the rio mode the problem was i said dave all very interesting but please why do we keep translating our object language into this rio mode and not really thinking in terms of the rio mode from a start 

it's very difficult the process philosophy is very very difficult indeed because everything around us is saying no yeah 

our perception the way we see it yeah 

and we think of mathematics and this is clifford very early on without quantum mechanics clifford said mathematics is about process it's not about taking three objects and multiplying it by two objects it's a process of three being doubled so the multiplication was the doubling was the activity and he came up with a language which is used in quantum theory today and that's clifford algebras

 um john you had a question did you oh wait a minute i've noticed oh the second part of the question right i forgot to sorry kamala dude do you want to can you say that again

 no i know what it is okay yeah i think they ought to be made aware that what they're taught is not the end of the story and i don't know how you do that because you've got to convince these guys they've got to do some hard work because without it we you see can you start quantum mechanics course without going through classical physics no we have not reached that stage yet but we've got to treat it to say that please don't take newton's first law of motion as being essential for every process because when you get into quantum mechanics you've got to abandon that rule and they don't like that thank you 

thank you very much thanks a lot yeah 

uh john did you want to ask a question okay hi scott thank you very much hi professor hiley thank you very much for your talk it's great thanks for the organizers also for this opportunity to interact with you so i have like two questions if you allow me well if you all allow me it's a very short but perhaps highly technical question that i would like to have and a second one that i hope this was generally interesting so can i ask this technical question 

well i'm not in charge 

yeah of course yeah okay 

so it's like if you have a reference of where you or some of your colleagues exploring the quantum potential not inter in terms of it as an operator in the sense that you speak of it as an energy right and i can't think of an energy as a hamiltonian so i would say if you in some you explore this quantum potential as a full emission operator related to the full density matrix rather than the diagonal that is usually present do you have a reference for this that would be helpful 

uh oh golly that that there's a lot of work has to be done to to to be able to convince you of the answer the best way of looking at all of this is to forget everything you've learned in quantum mechanics about operators and to actually get involved in moyal algebras in clifford and symplectic algebras okay it's in the algebraic structure that it's a much clearer way of seeing what is going on then it ties directly with non-commutativity and therefore you're developing a non-commutative geometry okay if you understand that that's another story which is a very technical story 

okay second question thank you so the second question is okay as you mentioned there are many interpretations of fantasies and and i wonder i mean one of them is like the kudis interpretation that like there is this interpretation by the cubism uh you know curious like fox um the interpretation yeah fox faces yeah yeah so that they i mean they place a lot of emphasis on the observer uh key in the theory of quantum physics like all quantum thesis is about how the observer actually interact with the world so how do you think that the bomb and your interpretation relates to that or the reason

 no no it doesn't it doesn't relate to that one of the things that i would like to banish along with john bell is the use of the term measurement in quantum mechanics okay because what we're trying to to develop is a theory of ontology which is how the process actually works why the hell should nature worry about what we know about it it works without us probing it and prodding it and we're trying to understand how it works without us prodding it now we have to be aware of the problems but to concentrate on measure please it i get exasperated over this 

because the mathematical structure von neumann tells us all about it but the physicists will not look at von neumann and get him take him seriously there are people like harg fortunately who are doing this or we're doing this but don't keep talking about measurement we're talking about unfolding processes yes they have experimental consequences but we're talking as if the measurement creates the ruddy thing the measurement doesn't we create a particular aspect of it because we arrange the the apparatus in a certain way but the process is going on whether whether whether we're there or not it's got nothing to do with us i'm sorry i i probably get harangued from this all over the place because people don't seem to be able to talk about quantum theory without doing measurements 

now the measurements i'm doing in the laboratory are not the measurements that these guys are talking about because they think the operators what you're doing is you've got a state and you're operating on that state that is not the way it works i'm sorry but i'm sorry i'm you you've got me a little bit rampant here i've got to calm down a bit it's 

because there's a a lot of mathematics out there that i'm not able to tell in this group which i would use to support what i'm saying okay but i'm not allowed to do that here because you people are interested in the general consequences yeah okay thank you 

i'm very interested in the mathematics as well but i'm afraid that we are not 

no i i fully appreciate it i fully appreciate it marco it's just that my colleagues in physics will say why do you let him loose saying measurement is not important because quantum mechanics as it is taught now is all about measurements not what happens between measurements one measurement another measurement so is nothing going on between the two measurements come on and as for the many worlds if i got into the laboratory and told vincenzo oh it's gone into the other world he would throw me out of the laboratory all right we won't go there then

 i i think uh michael ryan has a question oh yeah um yeah i was originally told that like an electron for example could exist as a particle or a wave possibly both at the same time from what you were saying before professor you think the actual particle itself does not exist

yeah but don't get me it it's the if we have an image of a particle and the image is usually unless my hooligan childhood days the image is a sphere it's not a sphere it hasn't got it it's not rigid it's at best it's a fluffy ball and it's a fluffy ball of energy and therefore it behaves very differently from the way you imagine a particle to behave okay

 so i would rather we've used this wave particle analogy because it's a lazy way of trying to get people to use schrodinger's equation i'm sorry i just it it's it it's uh hans christian andersen but the emperor's got no clothes on and i'm trying to desperately buy it some clothes from the mathematics store if you want to use that analogy 

all right okay okay does that help you? i'm not sure it helps you but i think so in a bit except on this double slit experiment when i first realized um on the internet first of all they only had one slot open so the politicals were all going through one slot there wasn't much interference but when they opened the second slot then there was interference and the way i assumed that worked is that the the wave part of this article or whatever you like to call it was interfere because that was going through the second slot even though the actual beam was all going through the walls that's where the quantum potential comes in because that organ that gives the behavior of the collective as i call it okay i think much better to think the wave is the collective but the question is how does the individual and the collective what is the relation between the individual and the collective i hope i don't sound like a marxist kind of thing but it's the ensemble average which is the envelope the envelope the the interference fringes but it's individuals how the hell do the individuals not go to that point on the screen when two slits are open right so there has to be some organization some global organization and the quantum potential is a way of talking about that global organization 

all right thank you professor any other questions out there sent us a private message asking which group at ucl is working on this 

uh it's a group under the principal investigator is robert flack and the people who are working on it is peter barker professor peter barker of the uh a mop atomic and molecular physics group and we've got two research i think there are more research students coming into it um i've heard three new names and i haven't met them yet no neither on neither in the flesh nor on zoom 

my main source of information is coming from vincenzo moricello and he is working with professor barker at the moment and they're in the it's in in it's in the a mock laboratory so i don't know if that helps

 thank you i think that's enough detail okay any other questions from the audience oh yeah laura

 thank you um professor healy i don't know the first thing about physics so i'm gonna this forgive my question it's gonna be really really basic um so i have i have an image of you playing squash and with your knowledge about quantum mechanics let's say that you are playing squash and you think that ball could actually get through the wall you have that concept that it potentially could happen so if is having that concept do you think stable in your mind something that could lead to you actually seeing the ball getting through the wall ?

no okay no because um there was a lovely movie that chris dudeny has made and that is that if you remember that the ball is represented by that wave packet that little lump do you remember on my transparency? if the ball happens to be in the front of that wave packet it'll go through the wall if it happens to be at the back it will not now what we don't have control of is putting that ball precisely where we want to in reality we can do it into theory but not in reality

 okay it's just it just means that if you think you can control nature forget it and that's where the ambiguity comes in you cannot control nature and if you think you can it's going to cause disaster that's the whole point about david bones fragmentation and wholeness you've really got to consider and this is where it really does impinge on our society you've got to think about the whole situation and this requires a lot of skill because 

what we normally do is we say oh what's the problem as david boom used to say and then deny that there is a problem no and you don't solve the problem and unless you take the whole situation into account so whenever we're talking we have to talk about a subsystem a system and a super system and it's those three levels of organization [Music] that you hope to avoid some of the problems of fragmentation in other words

 you have to know what your totality is so it's not the whole universe because otherwise we wouldn't be able to work there are certain features which are very significant in the global features in that process and the skill is to know what those features are 

any other questions from the audience um oh yeah ruth 

uh yeah i wonder if i could try this uh basil because i'm i i'm a linguist who's doing something which no other linguist does and that is to think of language in terms of process and what this a particular puzzle in language uh which people give an extremely ad hoc explanation to and it's that you can't have more than one thing out at the left they're just you have to just make a fix but if you've got a structure a configuration there's something you have to say in language that you can't have two of these things are one at the same time and i wanted to turn to the Pauli uncertainty principle to give an explanation for this so my question is to and this is because if you think in terms of transitions so if you think always in terms of you're actually building this stuff and you're going to define a transition which opens up one you if you say there's a second one you can't distinguish it so transitions if you define things in terms of transitions when you have a transition from one point at which you're at to the next one that's how you define it then if you iterate that it will be completely indistinguishable 

now what do you mean by completely indistinguishable? 

it'll be one the same thing if i give you a transition from a to b and i then say well i want you to build another transition from a to b it will just come out as that transition i want to and but then you're neglecting what i would call a super system there may be something coming in in influencing the target see i think of this as the as the source and the target all processes have a source and a target and the target is something which is like something waving around it's not determined in classical physics you always say you've got a source the target is always determined

 the bit of the story i left out for you this is because i'm thinking that the things these things are undetermined 

when they're underdetermined uh if you if you think in terms of yes but when they're under determined your source may give rise to as an ensemble of targets depending upon the global situation and we've got we've got to try and worry about what that global situation is um

 but but that's what we will remember you're a person in language and also in psychology that a person's behavior can be totally different when he's in a group than when he's himself so it's the group is which is determining the individual behavior 

so that you know we're not when we're not we seem to conform to the group in that sense so that means that what is the group what is it doing it's somehow forming this super system and you're responding your language etc talking about this is responding to that we we do it all the time 

if i'm on the terraces in the football i don't talk about plato so i'm i've got to talk in a way that i can communicate not that they're stupid but this is this is as it were the form in which you must behave in order to communicate so your language automatically changes it's different now it's rather interesting that you bring this up because this is exactly what somewhere you saw in one of my slides a thing called a groupoid 

a groupoid is the way of mathematically discussing what you're talking about and i would encourage you to go on because i think it's a very important aspect not in terms of the mathematics but in terms of your your own expertise 

okay thank you 

any other questions from the audience you can raise your real hand if you can't figure out the virtual one i can see everybody here right well uh yeah yes 

oh perhaps then this is a good moment to bring this conversation to a close you know there are certainly enough unexplored questions to prolong this conversation over several lifetimes we'd like to thank professor Hiley for his time and the way he unfolded his own inner insights and also scott for conducting this moderating this event tonight and of course thanks everyone who joined this com this conversation for your engagement interests and questions it was a pleasure to share this evening

 thank you for listening

  Quantum professor Basil J. Hiley, 2016: "Quantum Trajectories: Dirac, Moyal and Bohm"

 In many ways it seemed to be a new form of inner energy possessed by the particle, organising the flow lines in a novel way and suggesting a 'formative' cause rather than the traditional efficient cause.

....quantum phenomena emerged from a non-commutative phase space.

 Bohm's Approach and Individuality, 2016, Oxford University Press: Basil J. Hiley:

 "There we see that if one of the particles enters the field of a Stern-Gerlach magnet, it is then deflected either "up" or "down" depending on the positions of each particle at the time just before the particle enters the magnetic field. The particle in this field has its trajectory changed, while the other particle continues in a straight line. At the same time both spin components become well defined. This is a surprising result, but clearly shows that the individual parts cannot be thought of as isolated "little spinning spheres," a point that was emphasized by Weyl (1931)."