Science Quote by David Bohm

Bohm’s sentence lands like a calm diagnosis delivered over the blare of alarms. A physicist best known for questioning the metaphysical implications of quantum theory, he isn’t only talking about particles or equations; he’s calling out a mental habit: treating the world as if it’s cleanly partitioned into independent pieces. The sneaky power of the line is its framing of “separateness” not as an innocent mistake but as an “attempt to live” - a daily, institutionalized practice. It’s a lifestyle choice disguised as common sense.

The phrasing “notion that the fragments are really separate” carries a scientist’s skepticism toward naive models. “Fragments” hints that division is something we do to reality for convenience; “really separate” points to an ontological claim we smuggle in afterward, turning a useful abstraction into a worldview. Bohm’s subtext is that modern life runs on this category error: economics detached from ecology, personal success detached from collective conditions, nation-states detached from planetary systems, mind detached from body. Once you buy the premise, crises stop looking systemic and start looking like unrelated fires to put out with isolated fixes.

Context matters: Bohm wrote in the shadow of Cold War brinkmanship, nuclear proliferation, and accelerating industrial harms. “Growing series” suggests compounding feedback loops - problems breeding problems - while “extremely urgent” rejects the comforting idea that fragmentation is merely philosophical. He’s arguing that the deepest emergency isn’t any single catastrophe; it’s the operating system that makes catastrophe inevitable, then renders us incapable of seeing the connections until it’s too late.