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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Quantum Mechanics
Dr. David Bohm
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he answers the question, how can we know if a theory is correct? 'You have to be constantly sensitive to incoherence.'
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from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyTv9ld3nhg
Question: How do we know when something is clear? - because for a long time it was ‘clear’ that Newton’s world was the final answer, and then something else was seen to be the clear way.
Bohm: “Yes. You have to be constantly sensitive to incoherence. You see, it’s not that people should not have said that Newton’s world is clear but that this fits what we know, they simply said too much, you see, by saying ‘that’s the way it is.’ If they had said, ‘The evidence we have fits this idea,’ that would have been right. Now, there’s a tendency to go too far and say, ‘It covers everything,’ …
Editor's note: There's a tendency to go too far because the dysfunctional ego seeks for solace in certainty and absolutism.
"Even a good theory can’t cover everything; a good theory takes you much further but doesn’t cover the whole. The whole cannot be grasped in thought. There’s always some sense of the whole which cannot be put into words. And we have to move forward from that understanding.”
Question: I’ve heard that the proponents of string theory say there’re 26 dimensions, and then I stop and say, what does that mean?
“Well, who knows? (laughing) I think that that’s a hypothesis, just like Laplace said about God (laughing).
Editor’s note: Napoleon: "You have written this huge book on the system of the world without once mentioning the author of the universe." Laplace: "Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis."
“People once thought God was important [to understand science] but today less important. So, some people felt in the ‘string theory’ that this [26 dimensions] had a certain importance, but string theory has many problems, it hasn’t solved everything, it’s a hypothesis, that, if you start with these 26 dimensions [that is, if you assume their existence], then you can do some nice mathematics which will explain some things. That’s all there is to [string theory]. You’re not missing much by not understanding it. Because very few physicists understand [it], I don’t understand it, it’s very difficult mathematics, I get a general idea of what they’re doing, but I would have to devote years to find out [the details] of what they’re doing.”
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