This is a meaningful book both by its content and by its historiographical lesson. Let us begin with the latter. Hanoch Gutfreund accidentally unearthed, from the papers left by a late colleague, notes taken from a course given by physicist David Bohm in Israel in 1957, titled “Philosophical questions raised in a new approach to the quantum theory.” The audience was a group of Marxist physicists gathered by the Hashomer Hatzair Movement, a kibbutz youth movement in Tel Aviv. This book is the most compelling evidence of the influence of Hegelian readings on Bohm’s science and philosophy. Indeed, one may see this influence in Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, published the same year, and its later echoes in Wholeness and Implicate Order, from 1980. However, on the basis of these lecture notes one can infer how deeply engaged Bohm was with the reading of the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. While there is now a meaningful number of studies on Bohm, including two biographies, and the Bohm Papers are catalogued at Birkbeck College, there was no hint of the existence of these notes until Gutfreund found them. This book thus demonstrates the importance of thorough source research for the history of science and the need to preserve sources from recent science.

Dialectical thinking was always influential on Bohm’s manner of doing physics. He was engaged with the communist movement while still in Berkeley in the early 1940s, under the scientific leadership of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The first Marxist reading by Bohm was probably Friedrich Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, still in the US. While in Brazil, to where he moved to escape McCarthyism, Bohm worked with Mario Bunge and shared interest in dialetics and the philosophy of nature. From Mario Schoenberg, as Bohm Jew, communist and physicist, he received the advice to read Hegel because Vladmir Lenin “believed every good communist should read Hegel, although few actually did” (p. 12). These influences may be traced to the ideas of unity of opposites and the infinity of nature, as well as the placing of chance and causality on the same foot. Bohm broke his political and ideological ties with communism, disillusioned with the 1956 revelations of Stalin’s crimes and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. However, as remarked by Gutfreund and Renn, this breakdown did not reach Bohm’s philosophical views, as his engagement with Hegel and his dialectics were stronger than his engagement with contemporary Marxism (p. 212).

The lecture notes comprise half of the book (pp. 91–196), and the remaining sections place them in the broader historical and philosophical context. After a section intended to set the stage for the notes, the authors wrote extensive commentaries (pp. 32–90) about the philosophical contents of the notes. The book ends with an evaluation of Bohm’s legacy in physics and philosophy of science. Importantly, the authors argue in a convincing manner that Bohm’s interactions with the Eastern thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti, from 1960 on, should be seen against the backdrop of Bohm’s Hegelian views, and not the other way around.

The reader interested in knowing and assessing Bohm’s legacy should, then, take into consideration his philosophical investigations and his scientific works, as noted in the final section of this book, where Bohm is aligned side by side with physicists such as John Bell, Abner Shimony, John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger. This double and inseparable legacy may also be seen elsewhere, for instance, in Olival Freire’s David Bohm (2019). It is true that David Bohm’s persona in physics is that of a scientist deeply engaged in philosophical reflections. These features of Bohm’s scientific work may lead the incautious reader to think that, for Bohm, physics should be constrained or even determined by philosophical considerations. However, Bohm’s scientific style, when closely scrutinized, was both highly conjectural and deeply attentive to experimental results, even adjusting his scientific views when these data were available, which is a trademark of physics as a scientific discipline. Ultimately, Bohm’s work on the reinterpretation of quantum mechanics acquired resilience because he was able to reproduce the experimental results from usual quantum mechanics, at least in the non-relativistic domain. Later, he and Yakir Aharonov were the first to question whether the available experimental results confirmed or refuted Albert Einstein’s reasoning in his famous EPR thought experiment. With Aharonov, Bohm also predicted what is now known as the Aharonov–Bohm effect. This prediction implied physical effects on electrical charges in regions where the magnetic field was null, which was later corroborated by experiments. Before the Bell’s theorem experiments, Bohm and his student Jeffrey Bub tried to build a different model of hidden variables for measurements, suggesting a relaxation time, which was tested and discarded by the Harvard experimentalist Costas Papaliolios. As soon as he realized the far-reaching implications of Bell’s theorem, he and Hiley supported the experiment led in London by Alan Wilson to check the existence of quantum non-locality. Informed by the results of these experiments, Bohm and Hiley stated that quantum non-locality was the most basic quantum feature. Even when Bohm resumed his reinterpretation using hidden variables, he had been provoked by certain new results, namely the computational simulations led by Chris Dewdney and Chris Philippidis, in the late 1970s, with graphs of trajectories and the quantum potential suggested in the 1952 papers.

Thus Bohm’s scientific style in his ongoing quest for understanding the quantum was a combination of bold philosophical and scientific conjectures with careful attention to what experiments could teach us about quantum mechanics. The former is better known to the wider public, particularly because of his suggestions for a wholeness approach and the implicate order, a view he extended to domains beyond physics. Less perceived, however, is his attention to the empirical domain, and these lecture notes should be read with awareness of Bohm’s scientific style.