Science & Tech Quote by David Bohm

Bohm is describing a triumph of connection while quietly warning that connection is not the same thing as communion. The sentence reads like mid-century optimism on the surface: a catalog of marvels (radio, TV, air travel, satellites) stitched together into a single “network,” the world newly touchable, newly near. But the key move is rhetorical: he doesn’t praise technology for expanding knowledge or freedom; he frames it as a system that “puts” the world “into” contact, as if people and places are being inserted into an apparatus. Agency shifts from humans to infrastructure.

The subtext is classic Bohm: fragmentation versus wholeness. A physicist who thought obsessively about how our thinking breaks reality into parts, he’s sensitive to the way media and transport collapse distance without resolving division. “Almost instant contact” is intentionally slippery. It flatters the era’s speed fetish while smuggling in a qualifier that matters: near-instant isn’t the same as immediate understanding, and contact isn’t the same as relationship. The network can transmit messages faster than it can metabolize meaning.

Context matters: this is the late Cold War arc in miniature. Satellites and air travel are not neutral toys; they’re geopolitical hardware, commercial pipelines, surveillance enablers, propaganda accelerants. Bohm’s line anticipates a familiar contemporary paradox: the more perfectly we connect the globe, the more efficiently we can export misinformation, panic, and cultural homogenization. He’s not anti-technology; he’s diagnosing a new condition of modern life, where proximity increases, but so does the need for deeper forms of dialogue to keep the “parts of the world” from staying parts.