Science Quote by David Bohm

Bohm is doing something more radical than calling for a better model. He is trying to break a habit of mind: the reflex to treat our “basic commitments” as reality itself. In physics, those commitments include separability (things are distinct, self-contained objects) and reductionism (the whole is nothing but its parts). Bohm’s line lands like a quiet ultimatum: if your starting assumptions are already carving the world into pieces, no amount of mathematical polish will ever recover the sense of unity that quantum phenomena keep hinting at.

The rhetoric is telling. He doesn’t say the old theories are wrong; he says their “essential features” might be “recovered” only as “abstract forms,” shadows cast by something more primary. That move preserves the dignity of classical physics while demoting it from ultimate truth to useful surface description. It’s an argument for humility disguised as a technical proposal.

Context matters: Bohm is writing in the long wake of the Copenhagen interpretation, where quantum mechanics worked brilliantly but leaned on a patchwork of measurement talk that many found philosophically unsatisfying. Bohm’s own “pilot-wave” approach and later “implicate order” philosophy aimed to restore intelligibility without retreating to Newtonian intuitions. The phrase “deeper reality” signals his wager that the weirdness isn’t proof the universe is incoherent; it’s evidence our conceptual bookkeeping is.

“Unbroken wholeness” is the provocation. It’s scientific language carrying an almost moral charge: stop pretending nature respects our boundaries. The subtext is that the crisis isn’t only in equations; it’s in the metaphysics we smuggle in before we even begin.