Bohm: Now, the ordinary idea of matter is: it’s an object which exists external to other objects, passes through space…
Bohm: Now, the ordinary idea of matter is: it’s an object which exists external to other objects, passes through space continuously, goes from here to there, and connects up with other objects. Makes the whole that way. Now, to just give the idea of what I mean: I saw once on BBC television a device which I realized would be very useful for my purposes. It was made at the Royal Institution in London, and it consisted of two glass cylinders, concentric, one inside the other. The inner one was held fixed, and the outer one turned slowly, and you placed a very viscous fluid such as glycerin in between the two cylinders. Now, as you turn the outer cylinder, the glycerin on the outside is turning, the glycerin on the inside is fixed, and in between it’s moving at an intermediate rate. So if you took a small bit of glycerin it would slowly get drawn out into a thread. Is that clear?
Suzuki: No, you’ve got glycerin in your tube, in your cylinder, and then you put a drop of…
Bohm: The next stage is to put a drop of insoluble ink, which consists of particles of carbon, for example.
Suzuki: So you can see this drop suspended in the glycerin.
Bohm: And each particle of carbon is now carried along by the glycerin at the speed of the glycerin. And since the outer parts of the glycerin move faster, the particles of carbon are carried apart. Eventually they become so fine as to be invisible, right? Now, you then turn this machine around slowly, and the particles retrace their paths, and suddenly it forms a drop, again, of glycerin, right? And that actually happens. I saw this happening for the first time there when it was shown on the program.
Now, I propose now that this droplet has been folded into the glycerin, right? And it is then unfolded. Now I want to say that that sort of process helps to explain the behavior of particles. It’s only an analogy; we mustn’t take it too literally. But for example, suppose I put two droplets in, one next to or near the other, and I fold it up. Now, the particles from one droplet are going to sort of mix with the particles of the other, so they’re indistinguishable. Yet, if we turn the machine around, each particle seems to know where it must go and it goes backward to help form its own droplet again, right?
Suzuki: Now, what does that illustrate?
Bohm: Well, that illustrates a new order, because… see, if we put in a number of droplets in a row, you have an order, right? And we could pull them all up. The order seems to be absent, but it’s still present, because when you unfold it it’ll all come right out again. So I say there’s a non-manifest order. There’s an implicate, enfolded order, right?
Suzuki: Okay.
Bohm: I say that that notion of order is a different notion of order from the one which science has been using, which is the unfolded or explicate order, in which we say only things outside each other count and only external relationships of things outside each other are to be part of the fundamental laws of physics.
David Bohm, interviewed by David Suzuki, 1979 (video, transcript)