The Unknown

WIE: That could be seen as a rather ambitious goal, but one of the things that struck me about Bohm almost as soon as I began reading him is that in spite of his stature he seems to have been extremely humble. He seems to have had profound respect for what he didn't know.

DP: Yes, that was certainly true. Although there was of course the other side too. He would argue quite forcefully with people; when people were on the wrong lines he wouldn't let them off the hook. But yes, he had a sense that, before the whole universe, we know very little.

WIE: Do you feel that this humility played a role in his work?

DP: It certainly made it easy for the people that wanted to work with him. You just sat down and looked at the problem or discussed things. And in the same way it probably allowed him to sit and talk with Krishnamurti without that big sense of self being there. Most of the people that met Krishnamurti were aware that they were in the presence of a guru, which made it somehow difficult for them to speak to him. And his humility probably made it easy for him to speak to Einstein too.

WIE: And in his thought? Do you think this humility played a role in his ability to draw the conclusions that he did or to have the perspective that he had?

DP: You know, there's always an easy way out, isn't there? You could take your ideas and say, "I'll present them in a way that the public will find pleasing," or, "I won't take them too far." You can search for approval or for promotion—all of those things which lead inevitably to compromise. If you want to be successful you might find some little field and try to carve it out. But right from the beginning Dave never wanted to do that. He had the honesty and the modesty to do what he really wanted to do, which was to ask the biggest questions. I mean, what makes it possible to ask the biggest questions? You are either very arrogant or you freely admit that you don't know very much.

WIE: What impact did your association with him have on you, as a human being, and also as a scientist?

DP: Well, probably it helped me to give up doing science!
It came at a very good time, a time when I was questioning a lot of things myself and wanting really to go to an edge in what I was doing. I came to work with Roger Penrose in London for a sabbatical year, met David Bohm almost by chance, and started talking to him. Actually, what happened may be similar to what happened between Bohm and Krishnamurti: it wasn't that Dave revealed anything new to me, but he confirmed the suspicions that I already had. I probably had wanted to look at all these deeper questions, but didn't have the guts to do it, or didn't think it was practical or even possible. But when I saw that Bohm was doing it, I thought, "Well, why not the rest of us?" Maybe Krishnamurti didn't really tell David Bohm anything new. Maybe he just supported him in his inquiries. In my case, the crucial thing was to feel that support from Dave over a number of years. It's not that he thought he was actively supporting me; just his presence was supportive.

He also made a point of rejecting this idea of geniuses, of saying that you don't have to be a genius. Anybody can do it who has the energy to question and to face things, to keep working on something. That's an important point to make. Otherwise a lot of people will give up and say, "Well, I'm not a genius." This is what was said to me when I was doing research, "Well, you're not a genius, so why bother doing those things? Pick something small." Whereas Dave made the point that anybody can do this work. You have to have some training of course, but the main thing is to keep asking those questions. Anybody can ask those questions.

WIE: This advice you were given about not being a genius—is it routine for graduate students in physics to hear that kind of thing?

DP: Yes. Yes it is. It happens quite a lot. Another piece of advice I was given was, "Find a very, very small area in physics and then just publish about ten or fifteen papers on it; then you'll get a reputation. Then you can go and do this other stuff." In fact—another little story—when I did go and spend a sabbatical with Bohm, a very senior physicist in England asked me to come visit him for a few days. He took me out to dinner one night and, very fatherly, said he wanted to give me some advice. He said he knew I was working with Bohm and that it probably wasn't a very good thing to be doing. It would be bad for me, and really I should try to dissociate myself from him and go back to doing small pieces of physics. "Do small problems," he said. "That's the way that physics is going to progress, by people doing little bits of things."

Another person told me that his ambition was to be just a footnote in a textbook. Now Dave never thought that way. Dave felt that was a deeply false modesty, when people said that sort of thing, and that really the only important thing was to ask the big questions—otherwise, why do physics? I think this idea was expressed in one of the letters between Dave and Einstein. Einstein wrote, "If this is the way things are going, then there's no point in my doing physics anymore."

WIE: What are some of the directions your work has taken which you might not have pursued had you not met David Bohm?

DP: Well, it was more a matter of opening up the inquiry. David Bohm once told me that the most significant thing Krishnamurti had told him was, "Begin with the unknown." Now Krishnamurti didn't have much time for Dave doing physics—I don't think he thought much of it—but that was his advice: "Begin with the unknown." It's out of that, I suppose, that I've spent time talking with Native Americans, trying to understand their world. And over the last few years, I've also talked a lot with visual artists—sculptors, painters—trying to understand the struggle that they are engaged in, which also has to do with looking for a new order, and I've seen incredible similarities between that and what people are looking at in physics. Mainly I'm just trying to ask the biggest possible questions. Maybe that's what Dave left me with.

WIE: When Krishnamurti said, "Begin with the unknown," you must have a sense of what he meant by that.

DP: I think Krishnamurti felt that proceeding from the known to the unknown is not the way to work. You must begin with the unknown, with the question, and in the unknown one finds this enormous energy, whereas when you are constantly working from the known, there isn't that energy to penetrate things. David himself told someone else one time, "Between where you are now and where you'd like to be there's a sort of barrier, or a chasm, and sometimes it's a good idea to imagine that you're already at the other side of that chasm, so that you can start on the unknown side."

New Directions for Science

WIE: I read an article of yours in which you outlined the need for a completely new paradigm for Western science, and described your own explorations of the worldviews and cosmologies of Native American cultures. How are you able to reconcile these directions which, in the minds of many people, may seem quite far apart?

DP: Well, I suppose that when I did sit down with some Native American elders and tried to understand their worldview—not that I did understand it beyond the merest occasional glimpses—some of the things they said did seem to correspond. . . . But you see, I didn't ever want to do or write anything that was like The Tao of Physics because I don't know if I believe all that stuff.

What you could say, though, is that there is a certain perception of the cosmos, or a perception of our relationship to it, which is present among the Native Americans, and it's a process vision of nature: everything is process, it's flux, it's transformation. We come into relationship with this flux, but the basic reality itself is transformation and change. On the other hand, for several hundred years, physics looked for certain kinds of fixed orders and structures until finally quantum mechanics subverted that program. And then later on, chaos theory also subverted that program.

So you could say that Western physics reflected a human desire for a certain kind of order—a classical order or a Platonic order—which has now been subverted. It's as if nature has told us that we can't go that way anymore and that the way ahead, quantum theory or whatever, corresponds in some ways to the perceptions that I've had when talking to Native Americans. You can see that these two ways of looking at things are not that far apart. The Native Americans see a universe which is a flux, or a process, or a relationship of energies. And when you ask quantum physicists, "What are these things, what are molecules?" they will tell you, "Well, they are relationships of energies." For example, David Bohm's idea of an elementary particle was of a process: a particle is constantly in the process of collapsing inward and expanding outward. So we too are now dealing, really, with fluxes and processes and relationships, which is very similar to the metaphysics of Native Americans. I was very struck by that. I suppose I was also struck by the fact that they had developed a language which enabled them to live in that sort of a world. One of the key problems with quantum mechanics, as Niels Bohr pointed out, is that the Indo-European languages, which we use, deal with concepts and interactions between static objects, and because of that they just cannot seem to deal with the quantum world. We seem to be cut off from it by virtue of our language.

WIE: We don't have a language adequate to express those truths.

DP: Right, because our language works in terms of nouns, so what we tend to see is a world of objects and interactions. And because we have a noun-based language we also tend to see categories and concepts, and to put things in categories. So a certain way of thinking, a certain logic, follows from the languages that we speak. But some Native American groups don't have those sorts of languages, as a result of which they don't have the idea of categories to put things in, and they don't come up with the sorts of problems that we do. There's a kind of liberation in that, you see: by looking at their world and coming back to mine I see my experience of the world as culturally conditioned rather than inevitable; I see that there could be other ways of looking at it. That's what I found so valuable about that contact. So to answer your question, I didn't see any incompatibility between my interest in science and my interest in Native Americans. I'm talking a lot with artists these days for similar reasons: because I can see that the other big change that needs to come about in physics is a change in our concept of space, and all of the artists I'm talking to are very concerned with that. It could be that as we approach the millennium we are all beginning, through our different disciplines, to look at similar sorts of questions; or that the rigidity of the Western mind has come to an end and is giving way to something more flexible. Maybe science is being tempered by things like intuition, by compassion, by other sets of values that have not been present before.

WIE: From a certain point of view science has always been innovative, but at the same time scientists have traditionally taken great pride in the rigor and rationality of their methodology. These days however, several people who are considered cutting edge members of the current generation of scientists are pursuing very fascinating but, from a certain point of view, seemingly outrageous directions. Rupert Sheldrake, for example, who also appears in this issue, is investigating "the physics of angels."

DP: Oh, really, is he? So he's come out with it, then.

WIE: Yes, he's just published a book about it. And it occurred to me that people could conceivably think of this as a leap beyond the kind of rigor that scientific investigation requires.

DP: I'm sure many people would.

But you see, I'm living in this village in Italy where I pay very small rent and the wine is very cheap and all the food the people grow locally. I don't really have to satisfy anybody anymore so it doesn't really matter too much to me. And when I talk to Native Americans I can see that these people have incredible discipline in their life and in the way they work—much more discipline than we have in ours I would say—and also for the artists I've talked to, there's a long, deeply honest engagement with their materials and with their work and I see tremendous rigor in that. I'm interested in rigor in that sense. Maybe we should go back to David Bohm's idea of looking for the truth wherever it takes you and not compromising, not trying to sweeten things. The people who do that are the people I respect.

Now you do know of course that there are all sorts of kooky, crazy people too, both within and outside the scientific community, but I'm not so much interested in that.

WIE: So in this case for example, one could conceive of the physics of angels as a very creative, very risky direction in which Sheldrake is going out on a limb in order to explore something that he deeply believes in.

DP: You're asking me to comment on something I don't know too much about. But maybe I could put it this way—and I hope I'm not being mealy-mouthed: If, eight hundred years ago, some of the deepest philosophical minds in Europe such as Dionysius the Carthusian and St. Thomas Aquinas debated and looked very deeply at certain sorts of issues regarding the way they perceived reality and came to conclusions about it, then I think that is worth taking seriously. Now when you try to import that into quantum mechanics, for example, it usually does become totally flaky and stupid and new age. So the thing is, you have to perform a very creative act of discovering the language with which to express these things in a way that is honest to the modern world and honest to the original ideas. I think that's where the real difficulty lies: it's an act of translation. Because after all, who was it?—I think it was Nicholas of Cusa—who developed an idea very similar to the implicate order, but you couldn't have imported Nicholas of Cusa into quantum mechanics. It just wouldn't have worked. It needed someone like David Bohm to rediscover the idea, put it in a new context and a different language. So I think that's partly what it is. And if Rupert Sheldrake is able to bring intellectual respect to Aquinas and Dionysius and all those people within our modern contemporary world, then that is a creative thing to have done. I've not read his book and I've only talked to him briefly about this.

WIE: I think I agree, but I wasn't necessarily asking you to comment on Sheldrake specifically so much as on this kind of thing as an overall direction in contemporary science.

DP: Well, angels, okay. But flying saucers and alien abductions and things? . . . I've just come back from the Institute of Contemporary Arts conference in London last week where we had flying saucers, alien abductions, massive doses of drugs, Timothy Leary dying on the Internet—all of that stuff. Now that's getting a bit flaky.

WIE: So in making these kinds of distinctions, how do you draw the line?

DP: It's very difficult. A lot of it depends on the people involved. I think you can spot a kooky person pretty easily, and there are a lot of kooky people. But I suppose if you meet a person and you have a degree of respect for them, and then they tell you something that sounds a bit outlandish, you should spend a certain amount of time with them and go into it, talk about it, explore it. There's always a way, even if what you hear at first is a crazy language. I mean, when you hear that Swedenborg went to other planets and things like that, that obviously is kooky stuff; I personally don't believe that Swedenborg went to other planets. But if you gather that maybe Swedenborg had an intuition of some sort of truth about things and tried to express it in the only language he knew at the time, that becomes a bit more acceptable and then you can say, "Let's sit down with this fellow Swedenborg because he seems to be a very intelligent, deep thinker. Now what is he saying?" Maybe that's the only way you can do it, at a personal level. You may have to try, initially, not to be put off by the language in which the thing is expressed, whether it's flying saucers or angels or whatever, and ask yourself, "What if it's a metaphor for something, an image of something? Alright, then what is it an image about?"

Some people see flying saucers, other people see angels, but what is it really all about? Native Americans will say, "We see the guardians of the spirit." And you press them a little bit more: "What are the guardians of the spirit?" "Well, they are energies." Then you say, "Okay, if you're talking about energies, and I'm talking about energies, then we're talking the same language, which is about relationships of energies." It's about trying to find some sort of common language and respecting each other in discussion.

WIE: Then from your point of view, those are equally valid idioms or ways of describing the same thing?

DP: What I mean to say is that when you're dealing with a culture that has developed and existed for a long time, such as the Native Americans, or even Europe in the Middle Ages that talked about angels, then you have to have a lot of respect for it. Now that's not the same as saying that you have respect for flying saucers or magical inner children or your higher animal or anything like that, as people do in California. I'm not saying that. I want to stay on one side of this.

WIE: The distinction that's made by some of the people I've been reading—Ken Wilber and Huston Smith, for example—is not that these aren't all valid ways of investigating and describing our experience, but that there can be a kind of category error that takes place. The domain of science is that of an empirically verifiable physical reality, this argument goes, while the spiritual domain, and also the rational/philosophical domain, address completely different dimensions of human experience. All of these are related of course, but even so, one shouldn't expect to be able to say something in one domain that will apply in another.

DP: Yes, those are strong arguments, I can see those.

You know, there's a story about Pasteur. Pasteur was in his laboratory and somebody came to interview him and said, "Pasteur, sir, doctor, when do you pray?" And he said, "I am praying now," as he was looking through his microscope. In the individual life, the life of David Bohm for example, there could have been no time when he stopped being a scientist and became something else. He could not have accomplished that fragmentation of his own being. It's the same with a Native elder; there's no time when a Native elder is not in a deep spiritual relationship with nature and there's no time when he's not praying; it's happening all the time. So personally I don't see how a human being could stop being one thing and suddenly become another. And I think that for some scientists the basic impulse is a religious one, or a spiritual one—a sense of the numinous, of some deep order or some transcendental quality of the universe. You will always find that to be true of these scientists, even after you've distinguished their honesty and their willingness to face the truth from their work and the particular language in which their ideas are expressed.

But I do take the point that there's a danger in using science to prove religion or to give credibility to religion—you know, a "God and the New Physics" type of book. I think there's a danger in that.

WIE: You mentioned The Tao of Physics earlier. Do you feel that Fritjof Capra's work falls into that category?

DP: To be honest, I've never read it. I must be one of the few people on the planet who's not got around to reading it yet, so I don't know, I couldn't say, it may, it may not. But I do think there are a lot of weak analogies, when you say for example that quantum mechanics produces a vacuum state, which is a state of infinite potential energy, and then you jump from there to saying, "Well, that's God." Now that's really stupid stuff. That's very silly.

WIE: Picking up a thread we left behind, having more to do with your own perception of things: For you, what is the most important thing in life?

DP: Hmm. . . . An easy question! The most important thing in life. . . . You know, maybe I don't think about it. Maybe I don't think about that sort of thing. I mean, it's been nice finding a village on a hilltop, surrounded by beauty, where people live in a sort of traditional way, where you can lead a life that's balanced—a little bit of walking, good food, warmth. And, I suppose, being able to express yourself creatively, maybe that's the important thing—whatever it might be, writing or painting or doing something. And having relationships with people. . . .

I don't know. I don't know. It's not something that worries me. Maybe if it worried me I wouldn't be doing this. In the past I was more worried about things. Maybe I'm not worried at the moment . . . but nothing lasts forever!