ABSTRACT
Kepler and Einstein struggled to share in God’s creative thoughts; in the early 1950s, the prevalent philosophy was more smug. The goal was a covariant renormalizable quantum field theory of each of the forces, analogous to quantum electrodynamics. By the time I finished school I was somewhat disheartened by the contrast between the ideal of physics as a branch of philosophy, engendered by many popular accounts, and the dominant practice of specialized physics. At about that time, George Yevick shared with me some notes he had brought back from a stay with David Bohm, concerning a classical guiding wave theory of relativistic spinning particles. While I have reservations about that work, touched upon below, I still recall the stimulus I derived from it, and the feeling that I was being directed towards truly fundamental questions by it, at an important time for me. I have experienced this stimulation often with Bohm’s writings. In several basic matters, some of which I touch upon below, Bohm has been years or decades ahead of the rest of us in his intuition for the proper path, at least in my opinion. It is a pleasure to thank him for years of enlivenment.
