We need a superspace Bohmian mechanics

David Bohm (1917-1992) was a brilliant figure in mid-20th-century physics. Excluded from working at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project because of his politics, he still contributed calculations that helped enrich uranium for the bomb that fell on Hiroshima.

After the war, he worked closely with Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study but fell afoul of McCarthyism for refusing to answer questions or turn in his colleagues. Effectively fired from Princeton, he left for Brazil, where he did some of his most enduring but also controversial work. He eventually landed in the UK, where he remained a professor till his retirement in 1987.

Bohm worked intensely on questions such as locality in quantum theory, work which would inspire John Bell to develop his famous Bell’s inequality, showing that quantum experiments violate at least one of our natural assumptions about how the universe works.

He also worked on quantum interpretation theory, the philosophical meaning underlying quantum physics.

Problems like entanglement, where two particles appear to communicate with one another instantaneously across vast distances, were difficult to explain using intuition from classical physics.