Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohn

Dismissed by establishment scientists as a maverick or mystical rebel, American physicist David Bohm (1917-1992) sought a holistic physics, a unified vision of matter and mind, brain and consciousness. His search for an alternative quantum theory led him to formulate a cosmology depicting a universe of infinite levels, each qualitatively different yet part of an interconnected whole. In this brilliant intellectual biography, science writer Peat, Bohm's longtime friend and colleague, portrays an intensely cerebral man gripped by periods of crippling depression, who had an acute need of a guru or father figure, whether mentor J. Robert Oppenheimer or Indian philosopher/ teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, and who ultimately felt betrayed by each of them. Born in Pennsylvania to a Hungarian Jewish immigrant father and a manic-depressive mother of Lithuanian Jewish extraction, Bohm, who settled in London in the late 1950s, was a disillusioned Marxist thinker (he briefly joined the U.S. Communist Party in 1942) who bravely refused to name names to a Congressional witchhunt committee when called to testify in 1949. Peat's probing exploration of Bohm's quest for an ""implicate order,"" a deeper reality beneath the surface appearance of things, helps explain his influence on writers, artists, psychologists and philosophers as well as open-minded physicists. (Nov.)