Science Quote by David Bohm

Bohm is putting a finger on the cultural nerve of 20th-century physics: not just that two great theories disagree, but that they disagree about what it even means for something to happen. Relativity offers a world with clean narrative continuity. Motion traces a smooth line through spacetime; causes precede effects in an orderly way; the story can be told without gaps. Quantum mechanics, in the standard interpretation Bohm is implicitly side-eyeing, turns that story into jump cuts: discontinuous transitions, probabilities instead of determinate trajectories, and a basic fuzziness about what “movement” even is between measurements.

The intent isn’t to score a cheap “science is weird” point. It’s to dramatize a philosophical scandal: physics describing reality with two incompatible grammars. Bohm’s phrasing is blunt and almost legalistic, repeating “causally determinate” and “well defined” like terms in a contract that quantum theory refuses to sign. That repetition does quiet rhetorical work: it frames the quantum view not as a refinement but as a withdrawal of commitments.

Context matters because Bohm spent his career resisting the idea that indeterminacy is the last word. His pilot-wave theory tries to restore continuity and causation beneath quantum statistics, so the subtext is a challenge: if quantum mechanics makes movement “not well defined,” maybe the problem is our description, not the world. In that sense, the quote isn’t neutral reportage; it’s a provocation aimed at the complacency of “shut up and calculate.”