The Art Of Experimental Physics Book

I think this is the best book about the fundamental assumptions of science I have ever read. David Bohm is one of the wisest and open-minded thinkers I've ever encountered. He believes that science should be based on the assumption of the "qualitative infinity of nature." We shouldn't assume that anything is what it is absolutely. "Any given set of qualities and properties of matter and categories of laws expressed in terms of these qualities and properties is applicable only within limited contexts, over limited ranges of conditions and to limited degrees of approximation...." The continued existence of any entity or property depends on a balance of the processes tending to change it in different directions. "The broader the context or longer period of time, the more opportunity for that balance to be fundamentally altered." This is consistent with what the process philosophers have told us: Being is just an abstraction from becoming.

Scientific laws can apply only conditionally, not absolutely; they are always subject to revision. We should doubt that any description of "elementary particles" or statement of laws governing them could constitute a full and final description of reality. We should also doubt that we can know the universe's future: "the prediction of the 'heat death' of the universe will probably be invalidated by qualitatively new developments reflecting the inexhaustible and infinite character of the universal process of becoming."

Much of Bohm's book is a critique of the philosophy of mechanism, which he regards as an unjustified extrapolation from science's success in discovering certain conditional mechanistic relationships. Mechanism aims to reduce everything to interactions between basic entities with fixed qualities, like the parts of a machine. This overlooks another kind of relation, the "reciprocal relationship" between an entity and the broader context that makes it what it is. The earliest forms of mechanism were deterministic, assuming that the future could be calculated from the initial positions and velocities of entities and the forces acting upon them. Bohm does not confine his critique to deterministic mechanism, but extends it to the indeterministic mechanism of quantum mechanics. The conventional interpretation of QM attributes an absolute and final validity to the indeterminacy principle, so that only a statistical description of reality is permitted and no causal interpretation of phenomena is even pursued. Bohm regards causality and chance--necessary causes and chance contingencies--as two aspects of all processes. Any theory that embraces one to the exclusion of the other is inherently incomplete. "Neither causal laws nor laws of chance can ever be perfectly correct, because each inevitably leaves out some aspect of what is happening in broader contexts." That's why Bohm has led the search for a "hidden variables" interpretation of QM. In the end, Bohm regards the mechanistic philosophy in all its forms as contrary to the spirit of scientific inquiry, since it tends to regard a limited truth as the whole truth. "The essential character of scientific research is that it moves towards the absolute by studying the relative, in its inexhaustible multiplicity and diversity."

In contrast to the mechanistic philosophy, Bohm proposes a more holistic and organic view. "The inter-relationships of the parts (or sub-wholes) within a system depend crucially on the state of the whole, in a way that is not expressible in terms of properties of the parts alone. Indeed, the parts are organized in ways that flow out of the whole. The usual mechanistic notion that the organization, and indeed, the entire behaviour, of the whole derives solely from the parts and their predetermined inter-relationships thus breaks down."

Recommended for readers interested in theoretical physics or the philosophy of science.