Dirac thought that the uncertainty principle would be violated if you went down this road. And in fact Dirac actually got the equations which were almost the Bohm equations but he dismissed them. He got them to first order in h-bar, the Planck's Constant, but dismissed them, because he thought the Heisenberg Uncertainty Relation would be violated. What David Bohm did was to show that it would not be violated: that you would still retain the uncertainty principle. But then the question of what these trajectories mean becomes important. And this is where he then said well, "Let me be bold and say there is this unfolding and enfolding actually going on. Nothing to do with measurement. It is the actual process itself unfolding."
And we can make speculations about this unfolding and this is in fact what people were doing in field theory, but they abandoned it because the measurement seemed to be the primary aim of physicists. If were talking about measurements we know what we're talking about, seems to be one goes. Rather then saying, "what we should be talking about, as Einstein suggested, was speculations about the underlying movement, which then produce observable effects." And then we go to the laboratory and see do these effects, are they actually there.
Basil J. Hiley interview, Infinite Potential movie
"It is the quantum potential that organizes the way the individual trajectories work. So there is a dynamic whole process going on, in which the quantum potential appears....Remember this is coming from the noncommutative underlying process. And now we are beginning to think that underlying process is actually to do with the actual structure of space and time. That itself may not be continuous as we imagine. We don't have continuous geometries but we have a noncommutative geometry."
In the noncommutative structure there doesn't appear to be any quantum potential. But when we project it into a phase space, a spacetime manifold, a classical, the quantum potential appears....Remember the gravitational force arises because spacetime has a curvature in it. That spacetime is not Euclidian, it's Riemannian. Therefore what is revealed as a force is actually a feature of the underlying geometry. And what I feel is the quantum potential is a feature of the underlying noncommutative geometry.
...You explain the qualities that gives you the interference, without the need for introducing the wave function. And the wave function has been getting in the way, in my view, because we have this retched measurement problem, in which the wave function is behaving in an evolutionary manner in Schroedringer's equation and then when we look at it it collapses. And we have this collapse problem that's been going now for 50, 60, even 100 years. And it still has no solution and maybe has no solution because it's not relevant.
Fortunately we had Roger Penrose with us, at Birbeck at the time, and David Bohm, Roger Penrose, myself and some mathematicians used to meet and talk about this problem. So we were talking about ideas like pre-space: how are we going to put quantum mechanics into this pre-space idea so that we would have quantum spacetimes emerging from this? What is a quantum spacetime? This is what the discussion about. Roger Penrose was talking about his spin networks which has now because quite a big industry in some areas; he was developing his Twistors. And it was his developing his Twistors which led me into the Clifford algebra approach which is a noncommutative algebra, which is why I'm always talking about noncommutative algebras.
And that time David Bohm was developing a new idea which was called structure process. That basically we want to start with process, not particles moving in spacetime, but a process from which both particles and spacetime can emerge. Very radical ideas.
During that discussions, what we were thinking about that the process, how are we going to describe this process? And then I think I was reading some work by Grassmann and Clifford, way back in the 1850s to 1900s. And they were talking about process essentially, but they were not calling it process....And Grassmann in particular was saying that mathematics was not about material processes but it was about thought. So if we are thinking about the underlying process as a new radical idea we need to develop the mathematics to actually encompass that. What we coming to the fore, all the time, was that we need an algebra. An algebra is essentially something that has both addition and multiplication. And the multiplication became the order of succession, so if you have a process unfolding, the multiplication was the way it unfolded. Addition was the way it coexisted. So this was pinching an idea from Leibniz, who has this idea of what time was. Time was the order of succession, but then was also an order of coexistence.
Now can we develop an algebra that encompass that philosophical idea and that's what we were developing and that's what Penrose was developing with his Twistor idea. ...it was only after ten years of me working with David that .. Chris Dewdney and Chris Philippidis came up to me to ask to read 1952.... How can he [Bohm] get trajectories out of this noncommutative structure? That's what Chris was absolutely master at....
Unfortunately people though that...people thought, that we believed this: Now I was puzzled... even when I wrote the book with David Bohm, the Undivided Universe, I was still puzzled, how is it that you can have trajectories in this deeper process? ...We needed more radical ideas....Unfortunately David's time came too soon, so since then I have been trying to develop the continuation of these original process-based ideas. Developing a theory of structure process.
So these are states in which there are still activity present. So we never get to the stillness of nothingness. All is in flux....It's this idea of the energy. Energy is a very interesting concept. We always think that energy goes with particles. We fire a particle with kinetic energy and it goes bang, and causes trouble when it hits something, it releases its energy. But does energy have to be concentrated on particles? Quantum Field Theory tells us no! There's a field, this field carries energy in a nonlocal way.
The problem is for us, we're trying to describe the universe by getting outside. And then saying, Look! there's the valleys, there's the fields and so on. It's the God-Like view of reality. Unfortunately we're right in it. I'm saying there's no hill that we can climb up. That's the illusion. When we do that, we fragment everything. We are in it right at the beginning. Irreducibly in it! We can't separate ourselves. We depend on it. All our perceptions are coming in. Then we have the arrogance to say, "I'm important, I'm on top of the hill, you're not. So then we get into this conflict that goes on and on." Unfortunately we're all in it together.
We've got to encourage radical thought....I don't think being safe is going to solve some of the problems that still remain with this philosophy of process with wholeness....
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