Properties of Light, page 19
Samuel Mallach is a Bohm-inspired character, with virtually all the fundamental facts of Bohm's life changed. (He was, for example, childless.) What has been lifted straight from the life is his deterministic model for quantum mechanics and the dismissive treatment it received from the established physics community. He wrote in a personal letter: "I have only one strong emotion left, and that is hatred for the forces that have destroyed so many human beings, including myself." The cri de coeur, which I put into the mouth of the fictional Mallach, is quoted in the biography of the scientist by F. David Peat: Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm (Helix Books, 1996).
Only relatively recently have a growing number of "respectable" physicists, following the lead of John Stuart Bell, begun working with what they have taken to calling "Bohm-ian mechanics."
The formidable problem of reconciling quantum mechanics with relativity theory still awaits a solution.
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Rebecca Goldstein is the author of four novels, including The Mind-Body Problem, and a collection of short stories. Her work has won numerous prizes, among them two Whiting Awards. In 1996 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University, where her work was concentrated in the philosophy of science. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Rebecca Goldstein, Properties of Light
