The Pari Center is gearing up for a roundtable conference on “The Legacy of David and Sarah Bohm”. This meeting is generously supported by Taher Gozel. The first participants arrive on Monday 9 June and the meeting itself begins with dinner on 12th and ends on the morning of Monday 16 June.

The first day will focus on Bohm’s work in physics, including recent development using algebras and extending notions of pre-space. This will be followed by an exploration of Bohm’s ideas on language, culture, soma-significance, proprioception and so on. In addition Mark Edwards will be showing his AV presentation “A Hard Rain” which is inspired in part by the book he co-authored with Bohm.

We are keeping presentations short in order to leave plenty of time for discussion and we will be posting on this Blog.

A larger public meeting is planned for London on November 8.

It was my birthday recently and my family gave me an iPod touch, loaded with 61 albums from Bach to Bird as well as a map of the area. Being an iPod touch means that I can stroke my fingers over the screen to enlarge or reduce the area shown on the map.

As I rested that iPod in the palm of my hand it made me recall my first encounter with a computer DEUCE, housed at Liverpool University in the early 1960s. The computer itself was housed in an enormous room so that one was literally inside the computer since its short term memory used mercury delay lines – sound waves traveling through tubes of mercury – which were dotted all around the room. Its semiconductor memory was 1.6 KB which could be backed up by a magnetic drum with 32 KB. Its fastest speed was just over 30,000 additions per minute and its output was not to a laser printer but via punched cards.

Compare that vast room with the iPod’s 6 GB memory which still has plenty of room to add far more albums, video and maps. As someone remarked as they examined it “this is still the future”.

Two visitors to the Pari Center told me the following story about the area in which they live. It is yet another example of how people can come together in creative ways.

Fairfield is a district at the edge of the town of Lancaster, a place where city meets the countryside. The Green had been a child’s play area for nearly 100 years. In 1996 a developer applied to the City Council to demolish some old garages and build new housing. Some of the local people were not too happy about this so they raised money in order to buy the garages, demolish them, landscape the area and install benches and new play equipment. The next step was to erect an apple orchard on scrub land next to the Green.

The original plan had simply been to preserve the countryside around the Green but a secondary effect has been to create a genuine sense of community, one in which people organize such things as a Summer Fete, an Easter Egg hunt and even wassailing – the old pagan ceremony in which cider was drunk and evil spirits driven from the trees in order to guarantee a good crop of applies.

The story of Fairfield Green can be found at www.fairfieldassociation.com

You can visit the Louvre, National Gallery in London, the Prado in Madrid, the Met in New York and spend several hours walking from room to room, looking at painting after painting until your feet are tired and you capacity for culture totally satiated.

But wouldn’t it be far more fun to take a trip just to look at one, single painting? That is a very different experience. I recall some years ago being invited to speak in Rotterdam. I had one extra day before I flew back and when asked what I’d like to do said, “I’d like to go to Ghent to see “The Adoration of the Lamb” by Hubert and Jan van Eyck. And so I was driven there and for a long time, stood before that one painting. Then returned to Rotterdam.

Here in Italy I have driven to Cortona to stand before Piero della Francesca’s “Madonna del Parto” and on an other occasion to Sansepolcro to see the same painter’s “Resurrection of Christ”.

Once I was talking to the sculptor, Anish Kapoor and one of us happened to mention the town of Cortona. We looked at each other and immediately thought of just one thing, Fra Angelico’s “Annunciation”.

And what of London’s National Gallery. Each time I visit that city I head straight for the Impressionist section and sit before Seurat’s Bathers, and then I walk to the other end of the gallery, to the Sainsbury wing, to see Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ. I have stood before that painting so many times yet it was only on my last visit as I shifted my position and noticed a change of light that I suddenly saw the shower of gold that pours down from the Tree (the Father) and the Dove (the Spirit) onto Christ’s head.

And after that maybe I’ll wander past Botticelli, walk into that tiny room with the Vermeers or visit the Arnolfini Wedding.

But take that idea of a trip just to see a single painting, or sculpture or other work of art. What has been your experience? What has moved you?

I am currently completing a book on “Gentle Action”, which also deals with the who issue of trust – trust in business, the economy, medicine, science and society in general. If anyone has any specific examples of Gentle Action – by an individual or group, or has some reflections on Trust, please post them on this blog.

Chapter 7 of Pathways of Chance is entitled “Meeting the Blackfoot” and describes discussions with Blackfoot people and other Native American groups with lead to a round table of Native American elders and Western scientists. In particular we discussed the ways in which language is related to world view and how the world view of people such as the Blackfoot, MicMaq, Ojibwaj and others stressed a world of constant flux and change, not unlike that proposed by quantum theory.

This section of the blog could be used to explore the world views of Indigenous peoples. Note that a discussion forum on Indigenous approaches also exists on the Pari Center website.

One aspect of Pathways of Chance is that of growing up in Liverpool during the war and life during the dull 50s and swinging 60s - along with the birth of the Beatles.

Liverpool has changed a great deal but for 2008 it is the european Capital of Culture and a great deal is going on in the seaport. In particular Ringo will be releasing his new album, Liverpool 8.

So I’d like to hear from people as to what is going on in Liverpool this year, also any memories of Liverpool 8.

Please provide any links, updates and information about Europe’s center of culture.

One irony - the year I left Liverpool was also the year that Allan Ginsberg visited and proclaimed “Liverpool is the center of the world”.

I was especially interested in your observations about language bluntness of nouns-heavy English as a tool for understanding (not to mention explaining or talking about) the sorts of processes and relations physicists identify in their mathematics. I believe it also obfuscates the dynamics human relationship.
English speakers generally approach other languages confident that there will be words in English to correspond with all of the “foreign words” they encounter and that, if there are not, it is an easy matter to just use the “foreign word” in English constructions. For communication at the level of a tourist phrase book, this confidence is justified. In many situations, it does not much matter if statements made in another language are understood in the contexts of one’s own. Water is water in any language, and it satisfies thirst in any language. But the idea of water is, and what it means, its personal and social significance, vary from culture to culture and, to a less confusing extent, within a single culture. Concepts do not readily translate, and sometimes cannot translate.
The “stuff” of religion is deeply embedded in cultural world views, and precisely the kind of thing that language more easily obfuscates rather than makes clear.
An English-speaking Christian immersed in the globalizing technologically-centred and consumer-oriented culture of the Western mainstream should undoubtedly wonder how far it is possible to get in a wrestle with English translations of Greek, Hebrew accounts of largely Aramaic-centred concepts and events?
For one thing, English has its own particular limitations. In writing workshops I’ve led, I’ve pointed out some of the more extreme limitations of English and used it as a start point for creative writing: the challenge of stating the unstatable. In English, for example, the basic common sentence is someone or something DOING something to someone or something else: subject-verb-object, cause effect, action-reaction — THINGS bouncing about. It tends to simplify complicated, ongoing, multidimensional experiences into discrete episodes involving main players. Read the rest of this entry… »

About Quantum ontology: in Pathways of chance F.David Peat points out that the notion of the Many worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics as mainstream idea appears crazy, he and Bohm say that we may not have the complete picture of the quantum reality yet or in the case of Pauli’s irrational notion of nature we may never have it.

Now those who follow MWI claim that all you need is the standard formula and everything just flows from that, in other words you don’t need to add anything.

However as Peat, Bohm & Hiley point out that this is simply not the case and it still leaves you with some unanswered questions (see; science order and creativity (1987) or the Undivided Universe (1993)).

Well recently (2007) it would appear that the chief advocate of MWI Dr David Deustch (founder of the quantum computer) has inadvertently conceded the fact that even if you do accept the MWI it still cannot explain all of the Quantum realm, you need either another theory or add something else to it. Or in the case of Peat,Bohm & Hiley you reject MWI all together. Now contrary to myth you don’t need to initially add assumptions to Bohm theory, in fact in order to reach Bohm’s quantum potential you merely drop some assumptions:-

1. That the unit observable is the preferred determined observable
2. That your interpretation is always a concrete Hilbert space and never an abstraction. Thus leaving you with a somewhat closed theory, and leaving out the possibility (found in Bohms notion of the implicate order) of unending levels of reality and uncertainties (clearly a premise that Many worlders should have began with).

Saying that Deutsch does give Bohm theory the thumbs up, for being the only genuine rival to MWI.
One thing is for sure no matter how Deutsch et al dress it up, MWI is found wanting. Check out for yourself at Everett@50 - Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: 50 years and David Deutsch’s down load video lecture ‘Apart from Universes’ on the link: users.ox.ac.uk/~everett/abstracts.htm.

Gandhi once said that life should not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom, but an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual.

Upon studying David Peat’s notion of ‘Gentle Action’(while acknowledging that David may or may not have intended this to be so) it appears to be somewhat anarchist in conception some what akin to the likes of Peter Kropotkin or Bakunin.

Kropotkin once tried to find a direct connection between anarchist principles and science; I think he got it wrong headed. For while Kropotkin wanted to use science to justify his principles (As capitalism unjustly do with Darwins evolution) David Peat’s notion of ‘Gentle action’ does the converse in that it does not looking for social economic justification in science, but instead by applying concept from science to guide our social/economic systems, our moral judgements or principles. I think if Kropotkin where alive today he may have accepted Gentle action as a way of running a post non-statist non-capitalist society, especially when applied to anarchist principles. Personally If you push Gentle action to it logical conclusion, while it does not openly call for the destruction of either state or private forms of authority (i.e. tyranny) it finds them in conflict with any natural social economic order. Recently I put this to 2 well know anarchist Barry Pateman & Prof Noam Chomsky who also appears to agree that Gentle action is more developed idea from some of the underdeveloped notions found within anarchisim.

Anyway now get to David’s personal position (which you can find within his section on Ethics) with regard to Gentle action in which is where I part company (all in good faith I may add), his position appears to be I believe either (crypto-)anacho-capitalist or what the psychologist Dr Oliver James would refer to a the unselfish-capitalist. I may be wrong it could be just the way it is put, perhaps David does not have a clear position in this area yet (or never had) but it would be interesting to know?

Gordon Shippey