Physical Isolation and Marginalization in Physics: David Bohm's Cold War Exile

Abstract

David Bohm's career as a postwar American physicist demonstrates the effects of the cold war on the theoretical physics of that period. Bohm was fired from Princeton University because of his connections to the Communist Party while a graduate student at Berkeley during World War II; he left the country and took positions in Brazil and Israel and finally found a permanent post in England at Birkbeck College, University of London. Because of his political beliefs, Bohm was cut off from the scientific community that had nourished his early career; his isolation led him to explore creative alternatives to orthodox quantum mechanics but also limited his influence and audience within the mainstream physics community. In the 1970s, physicists and philosophers of science returned to Bohm's work as part of a reexamination of quantum physics.

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