Physicist David Bohm, one of Einstein's protégés, delved yet more deeply into the wave/particle duality mystery. He took the implications of the new physics even farther. He discerned that if the nature of subatomic particles depends on an observer’s perspective, then it is futile to search for a particle’s actual properties, as was science’s goal, or to think that subatomic particles, the essence of matter, even exist before someone observes them. In his plasma experiments at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, Bohm found that individual electrons act as part of an interconnected whole. In plasma, a gas composed of electrons and positive ions in high concentration, electrons more or less assume the nature of a self-regulating organism, as if they were inherently intelligent. Bohm found, to his amazement, that the subatomic sea he created was conscious. By extension, the vast sub-atomic reality that is material creation may also be said to be conscious. To those who foresaw the implications, Bohm shattered the useful but limiting premise that led science to its many achievements in modern times, crossing a new barrier, beyond which lurked the unknown, a scientific twilight zone. Intellectual observation, it turned out, the fulcrum of the scientific method since Francis Bacon, could only take an observer so far.
As with any dogma, what was once a useful guideline became a stifling limitation. Negating the ability of the human intellect alone to fathom ultimate reality, Bohm, then, challenged the scientific world to adopt a more profound understanding. Reality, Bohm’s work suggests, has a more subtle nature than that which can be defined by linear, human thinking, the province of modern science and the intellect. Within the fabric of reality, Bohm found not just the wave/particle duality phenomenon, as described above, but an interconnectedness, a Non-Space or Non-Local reality where only the appearance of waves also being particles exists. He saw, perhaps intuitively, that it is ultimately meaningless to see the universe as composed of parts, or disconnected, since everything is joined, space and time being composed of the same essence as matter. A subatomic particle, then, does not suddenly change into a wave (at velocities that would have to be beyond the speed of light, as Bohm’s mentor, Einstein, suggested), it already is a wave sharing the same Non-Space as the particle. Reality, then, is not material in any common sense of the word. It is something far more ineffable. Physicists call this Non-Locality. Mystics call it oneness.
In spite of those who disagreed, Bohm evolved a yet more profound understanding, that of an interconnected whole with a conscious essence, where all matter and events interact with one another, because time, space and distance are an illusion relative to perspective. He developed, in fact, a holographic model of the universe, where the whole can be found in the most minute part, a blade of grass, an atom, and where matter, circumstance and dimension result from holographic projections of subtle, but powerful, conscious energy. Actual location and, by extension, the shape-shifting of particles, all manifest reality, in fact, exist only in the context of relative appearances. Bohm discovered that every thing is connected to everything else, past, present and future, as well as time, space and distance, because it all occupies the same Non-Space and Non-Time.
David Bohm brought to physics and the scientific world the understanding that has propelled mystics and sages since the dawn of time. Rejecting the idea that particles do not exist until they are observed, he, like Noble laureate and renowned physicist Brian Josephson, saw that physics must see the nature of subatomic reality in a new way. It is not simply that conscious perspective effects the nature of the subatomic quanta, Bohm revealed, but that the subatomic quanta is conscious, which means that everything is conscious, even inanimate objects and seemingly empty space, the very definition, if one were possible, of mystical or spiritual reality.
