David Bohm

Born on 20 December 1917 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, theoretical physicist David Bohm was a leading authority on quantum mechanics and its interpretation. Bohm earned his PhD in 1943 at the University of California, Berkeley, studying under J. Robert Oppenheimer. Although Bohm’s research contributed to the Manhattan Project, Bohm himself was denied security clearance to work at Los Alamos because of his political activity at Berkeley. In 1946 Bohm became an assistant professor at Princeton University, where he worked with Albert Einstein and made seminal contributions to plasma physics and condensed-matter physics. His influential textbook, Quantum Theory (1951), was based on his lectures there. Bohm lost his job at Princeton in 1951, after he refused to testify against his colleagues before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was forced to emigrate and worked in Brazil and Israel before settling in the UK in 1957. After a research fellowship at the University of Bristol, Bohm became a professor of theoretical physics at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he worked from 1961 until he retired in 1987. Among his many discoveries and accomplishments is the prediction of the Aharonov–Bohm effect, in which a particle is affected by an electromagnetic field even when passing through a region where the field strength is negligible. He also developed the hidden variables interpretation of quantum mechanics, which expanded upon the paradox famously introduced by Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen (EPR). Bohm’s insights into hidden variables and nonlocality in quantum mechanics led to John Bell’s famous 1964 inequality. Bohm died at age 74 in 1992. (Photo credit: Library of Congress, New York World-Telegram and Sun Collection, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)

Date in History: 20 December 1917