Science Quote by David Bohm

Bohm is quietly detonating the usual picture of society as a battlefield of competing individuals. “Opposition” and even “interacting” are framed as outdated metaphors: they assume separate, self-contained units that collide, bargain, and retreat. By replacing them with “participating,” Bohm shifts agency from winning arguments to inhabiting a shared field. The real action isn’t in the clash between people but in the medium that holds them: meaning itself.

The phrase “pool of common meaning” does a lot of work. It implies that what we think of as private opinion is mostly a local eddy in a larger current made of language, habits, symbols, and assumptions. That’s the subtext: conflict is often not about facts but about incompatible frames, and those frames are socially produced. If meaning is pooled, then it can be polluted (by propaganda, ideology, bad faith) or clarified (by dialogue). Bohm isn’t offering feel-good collectivism; he’s warning that the “common” is unavoidable, and therefore worth tending.

Context matters: Bohm spent decades thinking about wholeness in physics and fragmentation in thought, especially in his work on dialogue. The line reads like a scientist applying systems thinking to culture. “Capable of constant development and change” is the hopeful hinge. Meaning isn’t a fixed code to decode; it’s a living environment. That’s why the quote works: it reframes social life from a debate to be scored into an ecosystem to be cultivated, where the most radical move is to notice the water you’re already swimming in.