On page 44, Weber's book entitled "Dialogues with Scientists and Sages: The Search for Unity, the discussion of light between Weber and Bohm is as follows:

Weber: ...there is one important idea that I would like to discuss and understand and that is the idea of light. That is especially important to me because you are a physicist. Light has been used as the privileged metaphor in the language of mysticism and experimental religions, going back to the Greeks and the east. In all these, light is the symbol of our union with the divine. They talk about a light without shadow, an all-suffusing light, and it comes up as the central metaphor in near-death experiences. Do you have any hypothesis as to why light has been singles out as the privileged metaphor?

Bohm: If you want to relate it to modern physics (light and more generally anything moving at the speed of light, which is called the null-velocity, meaning null-distance), the connection might be as follows. As an object approaches the speed of light, according to relativity, its internal space and time change so that the clocks slow down relative to other speeds, and the distance is shortened. You would find that the two ends of the light ray would have no time between them and no distance, so they would represent immediate contact. (This was pointed out by G.N. Lewis, a physical chemist in the 1920's.) You could also say that from the point of view of present field theory, the fundamental fields are those of very high energy in which mass can be neglected, which would be essentially moving at the speed of light. Mass is a phenomenon of connecting light rays which go back and forth, sort of freezing them into a pattern.

So matter, as it were, is condensed or frozen light. Light is not merely electromagnetic waves but in a sense other kinds of waves that go at that speed. Therefore all matter is a condensation of light into patterns moving back and forth at average speeds which are less than the speed of light. Even Einstein had some hint of that idea. You could say that when we come to light we are coming to the fundamental activity in which existence has its ground, or at least coming close to it.

Weber: Why is speed the determinant?

Bohm: Well, let's turn it around. If you look at Piaget and young children, movement is primary in perception. They see movement first and its unfoldment as time, and only perceive diatance later. They have a tendancy to say that if something went further it must have been going faster. They only learn later how to do it right. They are carrying some deeper perception into the ordinary explicate level, where it is inappropriate. In the deeper perception, movement is the primary reality in perception. The thing that is not moving is the result of the cancellation of movement. We say that there is no speed at all at light. To call is speed is merely using ordinary language. In itself, when it is self-referential, there's no time, no space, no speed.

Weber: What is it?

Bohm: It's just a primary conception. As you move faster and faster according to relativity your time rates slow down and the distance gets smaller, so as you approach very high speeds your own internal time and distance becomes less, and therefore if you were at the speed of light you could reach from one end of the universe to the other without changing your age at all.

Weber: Isn't that saying that it's approaching a timeless state?

Bohm: That's right. We're saying that existentially speaking or logically speaking, time originates out of the timeless.

Weber: This is primary and time is derivative of it, cutting it down, freezing it, arresting it.

Bohm: Yes, arresting it to a certain extent, not absolutely, but to a large extent.

Weber: When mystics use the visualization of light they don't use it only as a metaphor, to them it seems to be a reality. Have they tapped into matter and energy at a level where time is absent?

Bohm: It may well be. That's one way of looking at it. As I've suggested the mind has two-dimensional and three-dimensional modes of operation. It may be able to operate directly in the depths of the implicate order where this (timeless state) is the primary actuality. Then we could see the ordinary actuality as a secondary structure that emerges as an overtone on the primary structure. It's again the business of what is emphasized and what is secondary- the two kinds of music. The ordinary consciousness is the other kind of music.

Weber: The ordinary music can become noise, cacophony and disharmony. The music from the deep-structure cannot.

Bohm: The ordinary music is harmonious only in a limited area.

Weber: It's harmonious when it properly expresses this deeper harmony- Pythagoras' harmony of the spheres- but that other music is never disharmonious.

Bohm: We might propose that. Let's say there are two poles where we can operate. We could operate from that extreme pole all the way to the ordinary pole, but we have accepted the distorted view that we can only operate at one pole, or very near it.

Weber: We have already closed the gate when we needn't do so.

Bohm: Yes.

Weber: For the mystics there is always light. The primary clear light in the "Tibetan Book of the Dead" is the first thing the dying person is aware of. If he doesn't move towards it or away from it or feel awe or fear or manipulate it in any way as if it were outside himself, then he merges with it and is liberated, enlightened. Christ says: "I am the light," and so on. I've always asked myself, why light? Your saying that from the point of view of a physicist, it has to do with the absence of speed and the closeness of contact.

Bohm: Light is what enfolds all the universe as well. For example, if you're looking at this room, the whole room is enfolded into the light which enters the pupil of your eye and unfolds into the image and into your brain. Light in its generalized sense (not just ordinary light) is the means by which the entire universe unfolds into itself.

Weber: Is this a metaphor for you or an actual state?

Bohm: It's an actuality. At least as far as physics is concerned.

Weber: Light is energy, of course.

Bohm: It's energy and it's also information-content, form and structure. It's the potential of everything.

Weber: Physicists are not satisfied that they have understood light up to now because of the particle-wave paradox, right?

Bohm: Yes, I think that to understand light we'll have to understand the structure underlying time and space more deeply. You can see that these issues are related in the sense that light transcends the present structure of time and space and we will never understand it properly in that present structure.

Weber: How would implicate order philosophy handle it?

Bohm: It could handle it more natually, mathematically speaking, because it doesn't commit itself to the idea of separate points in space; but it may say that the underlying reality is something localized. One view says that light moves from one place to to another through a series of positions, and the other view says it doesn't do that at all. Rather, light exists, it just simply is.

Weber: It is at all points?

Bohm: Points are defined by the intersections of different rays of light. That's the way we actually do it in perception. We infer a point from the fact that many light rays are coming from it, say a star or any point. In this view, points would be understood as the intersection of many light rays. The light is fundamental, the null ray. That's a technical term that shows the recognition of this fact in ordinary physics.

Weber: It's where every particle of matter is in contact without the slightest gap between them.

Bohm: Yes, it's possible to have that contact without a gap.

Weber: So light is one continuous, unbroken, undivided whole?

Bohm: You would have to look at it that way, yes; especially if you consider the quantum theory of it which says the action in it is undivided as well. What G.N. Lewis had in mind was to explain the quantum in that way. It was very mysterious to say that light is a wave which spreads continuously through space and yet that a single quantum of energy goes from one point to another. How could that happen? G.N. Lewis said this wave was some sort of an abstraction, and he said what actually happened in each ray was that there was an immediate contact from the source to the absorber. One understood the quantum in that way, that there was no spreading out of energy.

Weber: It therefore takes no time, no transmission, no distance. There isn't any, is what you're saying.

Bohm: That is the view I'm proposing. The ordinary view is another map of it. You can take many maps of the world; one of them is Mercator's projection, which is quite good near the equator but it says near the poles that the space is infinite. So maps can have the wrong structure. We can say that the ordinary space-time is a map which holds fairly well for ordinary speed, but when you get to the speed of light it's as wrong in structure as Mercator's projection is at the pole.

Weber: We say light is clarity, light illumines, light is energy, some mystics have said light is love, compassion, understanding, light can make whole or heal. If light is the background of everything, what would be its relationship to the foreground?

Bohm: Light is this background which is all one but its information-content has the capacity for immense diversity. Light can carry information about the entire universe. The other point is that light, by interactions of different rays, (as field theory in physics is investigating today), can produce particles and all the diverse structures of matter.

Weber: You've stressed information and that has to do with knowing the universe.

Bohm: A kind of knowing.

Weber: The other aspect would have to do with its being. Maybe there's an undifferentiated realm of light and when it radiates itself as being, as particles, those might be its "shadows" or finite expression.

Bohm: They are expressions but they are ripples on this vast ocean of light. This ocean of energy could be thought of as an ocean of light. But the information-content may be such as to predispose certain light rays to combine so that they move back and forth rather than moving straight ahead, and thus forming particles.

Weber: Are those ripples, those particles, the silhouette of that light?

Bohm: Implicit in the information-content of the light- you could say that. About silhouette, I don't know. Something would have to throw the shadow. What is going to do that? The light, as it were, determines itself to make particles.

Weber: In order to do what?

Bohm: I don't know. But we're proposing that this allows for a richer universe.

Weber: To be consistent one might have to say that the light transforms aspects of itself into particles in order that those particles will reveal the light.

Bohm: That's right, they will reveal the potential of the light in a new way. So the light and the particles together make a higher unity. Most physicists subtract off this infinity and say it doesn't count and what's left over are the particles, and they claim that these are all that counts.

Weber: But you're claiming that's incorrect and shallow because it's subtracting off the very thing in which these particles have their roots and being.

Bohm: That's why I say present physics doesn't understand it, it's merely a system of computing and getting empirical results.

Weber: We've given light a cosmological, a physical, and a metaphysical interpretation. What about the psychological and spiritual interpretations? Why do people who tap into that realm of light feel a rare peace and happiness even though light is considered neutral and value-free by physics?

Bohm: The mind may have a structure similar to the universe and in the underlying movement we call empty space there is actually a tremendous energy, a movement. The particular forms which appear in the mind may be analogous to the particles, and getting to the ground of the mind might be felt as light. The essential point is not that it's light but rather this free, penetrating movement of the whole.

Weber: Somehow the energy it triggers in the experimenter is an integrated whole and that perhaps is what accounts for this profound sense of peace.

Bohm: Yes. The analogy has often been made that even though the ocean is all stirred up and quite stormy on the surface, if you get to the bottom it is peaceful.

Hi GogoJF:



Sage Bohm said: "So matter, as it were, is condensed or frozen light. Light is not merely electromagnetic waves but in a sense other kinds of waves that go at that speed. Therefore all matter is a condensation of light into patterns moving back and forth at average speeds which are less than the speed of light. Even Einstein had some hint of that idea. You could say that when we come to light we are coming to the fundamental activity in which existence has its ground, or at least coming close to it".



I completely agree with Bohm that matter is made of frozen light, provided his concept of 'electromagnetic wave' is dropped or reinterpreted to mean a 'discrete particle' as defined in this paper by Meridian's Physicist Alexandra de Markoff: Alexandra de Markoff

Just try to remember that traveling at the "speed of light" means you are leaving one place and traveling toward another. This precludes being in both places at once, even if you are going in circles. "Time" must pass for those not traveling at "the speed of light," or you haven't moved at the "speed of light."

"Time" stops for the receding place, but passes "instantly" for the destination, when traveling at "the speed of light. The "traveler" is caught between frozen "time" behind and instantly unraveling "time" ahead.

Web 2.0 thinkers are discussing "the concept of light", sorry they said "the Concept of Light".
If they wanted to think further than the tip of their nose, they should first switch off their computer screen.

Anonymous already knows everything, so, rather than think for yourself just consult him. You could just as well be a lawyer, Mr Anonymous. They know everything, too.