Implicate Order

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A drop of ink is placed in a cylinder of glycerine and the cylinder is slowly turned. The droplet draws out into a thread, thins, and vanishes; the fluid looks uniform again. Reverse the rotation and the thread gathers itself back into a visible drop, in the same spot, as if it had been waiting. The ink was never destroyed and never diffused — only spread through the medium in a form the eye could not read, then drawn back into view. David Bohm used this device for the rest of his life to make one point that ordinary intuition resists: order can be present without being apparent. Something can be enfolded into a whole and unfolded out of it again, and the unfolded version we happen to see need not be the more basic of the two.

That image carries the whole of what Bohm called the implicate order, and it also marks where his argument leaves physics and becomes something else. Three things travel under his name, and they are not the same thing, and most of the confusion around him comes from letting one borrow the standing of another. The first is a piece of physics. The second is a metaphysics. The third is a reception, mostly outside science, that has loved the metaphysics for reasons of its own.

The physics came first, and it is real work. Bohm trained under Robert Oppenheimer at Berkeley, took his doctorate in 1943, and laid much of the foundation of modern plasma theory; the Aharonov–Bohm effect of 1959, which showed that the magnetic vector potential has physical consequences even where the field itself is shielded away, is named for him. His 1951 textbook Quantum Theory drew Einstein’s praise — and left its author dissatisfied with the orthodox account he had just expounded so clearly. In 1952, encouraged by conversations with Einstein, he published a “causal interpretation” of quantum mechanics built on hidden variables. In it, particles always have definite positions; the wave function evolves by the ordinary Schrödinger equation, and the particle positions are then carried along by a guiding equation in which, as one careful summary puts it, “the configuration of a system of particles evolves via a deterministic motion choreographed by the wave function.” Bohm had independently rediscovered a theory Louis de Broglie sketched in 1927 and then abandoned, and he was the first to grasp what it implied.

What it implied was a quiet scandal. The received wisdom, resting on a misread theorem of von Neumann’s, was that no theory of definite underlying values could ever reproduce quantum mechanics. Bohm’s did. John Bell, who would build the twentieth century’s sharpest result about quantum correlation on exactly this ground, recalled the moment plainly: “But in 1952 I saw the impossible done. It was in papers by David Bohm.” Two features of the theory matter most here. It dissolves the measurement problem — in Bohm’s picture, as Bell liked to say, pointers always point, because an outcome is just where the actual particles ended up, not a collapse no equation describes. And it is openly nonlocal: the velocity of any particle in an entangled system depends, through the guiding equation, on the positions of the others, however distant. Studying that theory is what led Bell to prove the deeper point — that the nonlocality is not Bohm’s quirk but nature’s, since the predictions of standard quantum mechanics imply it too. The connection cannot carry a signal; the nonlocal influence is screened from any use, just as entanglement’s correlations are. But it is there, and it is the seed from which everything stranger in Bohm’s thought would grow.

The crucial fact about this 1952 theory, often lost in the later mysticism, is its standing. Bohmian mechanics is empirically equivalent to standard quantum mechanics — it reproduces, in principle, everything from spectral lines and scattering to superconductivity and quantum computing, because it shares the same Schrödinger equation. It is a legitimate minority interpretation, admired by Bell, who became its foremost advocate through three decades; it is taught, defended, and developed today. What it is not is a fringe theory or a refuted one. A physicist who prefers it has chosen a different picture of the same verified world, not a different set of predictions. The metaphysics that follows borrows none of this security, and Bohm, to his credit, never quite pretended otherwise.

For the picture that drew Bohm in — a world that is, beneath appearances, one undivided and nonlocally connected whole — would not stay confined to particle trajectories. By 1980, in Wholeness and the Implicate Order, he had generalized it into an ontology. The world we perceive, the explicate or unfolded order, is the familiar arena of separate objects in space and time. Bohm treated those separate, persisting things not as the bedrock of reality but as relatively stable abstractions — patterns unfolded, for a while, out of something deeper. The deeper level is the implicate or enfolded order, in which, he wrote, “space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships” of things, and “an entirely different sort of basic connection” obtains. His model for it was the hologram, where each fragment of the plate contains a recoverable version of the entire image: “a total order is contained, in some implicit sense, in each region of space and time,” so that “each region contains a total structure ‘enfolded’ within it.” Beneath both orders he placed the holomovement — the unbroken, flowing totality from which the implicate and explicate continually arise and into which they return, reality as “undivided wholeness in flowing movement.”

Here the register has changed completely, and Bohm half-said so. The holomovement is not a measured quantity and was never meant to be one; he called it “an unknown and indescribable totality” and stated flatly that “the holomovement is undefinable and immeasurable.” This is deliberate apophatic metaphysics, a claim about what fundamentally is, not a hypothesis with a number attached. The 1952 interpretation makes the same predictions as orthodox quantum mechanics and can be argued about on that basis; the implicate order, taken as a description of the ground of being, makes no distinct testable prediction of its own — its empirical content, where it has any, lives back in the interpretation it grew from. Physics has no quarrel with Bohm the physicist and no opinion to offer on the holomovement, because the holomovement, by its author’s own definition, lies outside what physics measures. That boundary is the single most important thing to hold steady about him.

The same enfolding gesture is what let Bohm cross the oldest divide in philosophy. He rejected Descartes’ partition of mind from matter, proposing instead that “the explicate and manifest order of consciousness is not ultimately distinct from that of matter in general” — that thought and substance are two unfoldings of one implicate ground rather than two kinds of stuff. Late in life he developed this into what he termed soma-significance, pairing the somatic and the meaningful as inseparable aspects of a single reality in which to signify a thing is to in-form it, to put form into it. He offered the idea, characteristically, as ontology — “a literal description of what is” — and hoped, as he put it in 1994, that “the notion of soma-significance will make possible a kind of appearance that puts us into a much better contact with the basically unknown reality.” Whether any of this solves the problem of how matter comes to feel anything is exactly the kind of question on which philosophy remains divided; it is a proposal in the philosophy of mind, with the standing of a proposal, not a result imported from the laboratory.

What carried these ideas furthest from physics was a friendship. From the early 1960s, with recordings beginning in 1965 and continuing for some two decades, Bohm met repeatedly with the Indian teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, and the exchanges between physicist and mystic became among the most sustained of his life. Their recorded dialogues — gathered in The Ending of Time, The Future of Humanity, and The Limits of Thought — circle the origin of human conflict in the separative, time-bound self, the chance of an “insight” that might end it, and the ground of being and the place of consciousness within it. Bohm served as a trustee of Krishnamurti’s school. Through this channel, and through the broad cultural reach of Wholeness and the Implicate Order, the language of enfoldment passed into nondual, holistic, and perennialist circles, where the holomovement has been invoked as an image of collective awakening and planetary coherence, and where the phrase “each part enfolds the whole” reads almost as a translation of an old intuition — the One folded into the many, separateness as appearance over an undivided ground. A reader steeped in that older tradition will hear the correspondence. It is worth marking exactly what kind of correspondence it is: a resonance at the level of imagery and longing, traveling on the prestige of a real physicist, but not a finding that physics has signed.

There is one near-neighbor in science, and its position is instructive. The neuroscientist Karl Pribram, learning of Bohm’s work in 1975, proposed that memory might be stored not in particular clusters of neurons but holographically, distributed so that any large piece carries the whole — a holonomic model of the brain he developed in early collaboration with Bohm himself. Bohm had wondered the same thing, suggesting memory might be “enfolded within every region of the brain.” The theory is elegant and it remains a minority view, opposed by mainstream neuroscience, with the analogy between brain and hologram still unsettled. That its strongest scientific ally is itself contested says something honest about where the implicate order sits.

The drop of ink returns to mind. Bohm’s lasting contribution to physics is secure and was made by ordinary means — equations, predictions, a sharper account of nonlocality that Bell took further. The implicate order is the larger and the more beautiful claim, and the more uncertain one: a vision of the world as a single folding and unfolding motion, offered as metaphysics by a man who knew the difference and mostly kept faith with it. The thread of ink can be drawn back into a drop. Whether the same can be said of the world is not a thing the cylinder, or any cylinder, was ever built to show.

→ Related: Quantum Entanglement · Jiddu Krishnamurti · Synchronicity · Panpsychism · Hard Problem Of Consciousness