David Bohm

Olival Freire Jr. is Professor of Physics and History of Physics at the Universidade Federal da Bahia. In Brazil, he earned a Ph.D. in History (USP) and is fellow at the CNPq. He was researcher at MIT, Harvard, Université de Paris VII, the University of Maryland, and the American Institute of Physics.  He is also author of “The Quantum Dissidents – Rebuilding the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics 1950-1990”, Springer, 2015.

• Introduction: Living through Cold War Storms, Attempting to Understand the Quantum.- From Wilke-Barres to a Physics PhD at Berkeley (1917-1945).- Teaching and doing research at Princeton, caught up in the Cold War storms (1947-1951).- The long campaign for the causal interpretation (1952-1960). Brazil, Israel, and the U.K..- From the Causal Interpretation to the Wholeness and Order – The First Stage of the London Years (1960-1979).- The Quest for Compatibility between the Causal Interpretation and the Wholeness Approach (1979-1992).- Epilogue.- The legacy of David Bohm in physics – An essay in scientometry.

“Freire’ book is not only enriching those already interested in David Bohm and the history of quantum mechanics. It also shows what a scientific biography can do for the historical understanding of physics. The book is highly recommended.” (Christian Forstner, Physics in Perspective, Vol. 22, 2020)