Interview of David Bohm by Lillian Hoddeson on 1981 May 8

proprioception, 10 months ago

From the Transcript:
...Hoddeson:
I’m interested in learning where your early interests in science came from.

Bohm:
Right. Well, I think I became interested in science when I was 8 or 9, when I read some science fiction stories. Then later, we had a book in the library, no a book in my fourth grade class, on astronomy which really impressed me with all these great things going on in the heavens, all the order, and so on. And then I had a few friends, and we went to the library to pick up some chemistry, I was around 12 or 13, and I became more and more interested in science, especially in physics...

...Bohm:
Yes. Then I had a theory of trying to imagine the universe was four-dimensional, that we were sort of structures going through the fourth dimension, but we were only aware of three of them. I had one or two friends, and we used to talk about these things when I was in high school. And I used to like to study, also to construct model airplanes and small radios.

Hoddeson:
What about these friends, did they end up going into —

Bohm:
One was the son of a miner. I don’t know how he ended up. After he left school, he probably took some sort of job. I lost track of him. Another was able to go to college, and became an engineer...

...Hoddeson:
What got you to start studying plasmas?

Bohm:
Well, first of all, because that’s what was going on there. But then it became interesting, because I could see the plasma as an interesting thing. First of all, it was a sort of an autonomous medium; it determined its own conditions, it had its own movements, which were self-determined, and it had the effect that you had collective movement, but all the individuals would contribute to the collective and at the same time have their own autonomy. Therefore, it seemed that there were a great many interesting things that you could think about in the plasma. And I became quite interested in it. The magnetic field complicated it in a large number of ways. Actually, we did some work there which came out later — I think Wakerling edited it — on plasma magnetic diffusion, and also sheaths in magnetic plasmas, and so on...