Implicate and explicate order
| Scientific Theory | |
|---|---|
| Name | Implicate and explicate order |
| Type | Ontological framework for physics |
| Author(s) | David Bohm |
| Keywords | implicate order, explicate order, holomovement, wholeness, fragmentation, non-locality, hologram |
| Year | 1980 |
The implicate and explicate order are ontological concepts introduced by the physicist David Bohm to describe a reality deeper than the one physics ordinarily treats. The explicate order is the manifest world of apparently separate objects extended in space and time — the world our theories normally describe. The implicate order is a deeper, enfolded order in which everything is contained within everything else, and from which the explicate world continually unfolds.
Bohm set out the proposal principally in Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980). It is not a fringe addendum to his physics but the natural extension of it: having shown in his causal interpretation that quantum theory admits a realist reading, and having accepted that this reading is irreducibly non-local, he concluded that the separateness of objects — not their connection — is what stands in need of explanation.
Fragmentation and wholeness
Bohm's starting point was a criticism of how science habitually proceeds. Analysis by division into parts is enormously effective, but he argued it had hardened into an unexamined assumption that the world is an assembly of separate pieces. He called the result fragmentation: a habit of thought that separates observer from observed, part from whole, and science from meaning, and which then mistakes its own divisions for features of nature.
Quantum theory, on his reading, indicates otherwise. Non-locality and the failure of systems to decompose into independent parts point to an undivided wholeness in which the apparent separateness of things is a surface appearance.
The two orders and the holomovement
In the implicate order, each region enfolds information about the whole. The explicate order — ordinary space, time and separate objects — is a special, unfolded case of it, not the fundamental level. Underlying both is what Bohm called the holomovement: the undivided flowing whole whose continual enfolding and unfolding generates the structures we observe.
He offered two illustrations:
- The hologram: every part of a holographic plate contains information about the entire image, so the whole is enfolded in each region — unlike a photograph, where each point corresponds to one point of the object.
- The ink drop in glycerine: a droplet stirred into viscous fluid disperses until invisible, then reappears when the stirring is reversed. The drop was never destroyed, only enfolded — present in the whole rather than located in a part.
Relation to Bohm's physics
The framework connects directly to his interpretation of quantum mechanics. In later work Bohm and Basil Hiley described the quantum potential as carrying active information — a field whose effect depends not on its intensity but on its form, guiding the particle in the way that meaning guides action rather than the way a force pushes matter. On this account the non-locality of the causal interpretation is not a puzzle but exactly what one expects if the explicate world unfolds from an enfolded order. See De Broglie–Bohm theory and Quantum mechanics.
Reception
The proposal found a wide audience outside physics — in philosophy, psychology, and in Bohm's long dialogue with Jiddu Krishnamurti — and it is often criticised on that account, as speculation beyond the reach of experiment. Mainstream physics has largely ignored it, on the grounds that it yields no distinct predictions.
Its defenders reply that this misunderstands what is being offered. The implicate order is proposed as an ontology — an account of what exists such that the formalism makes sense — and the orthodox alternative is not a competing ontology but a refusal to supply one. On this view the objection that Bohm's account is untestable applies with equal force to the Copenhagen interpretation, which is likewise not a prediction but a stance about what may be said.
Related work from researchers on this wiki
The anti-reductionist current in Bohm's thinking runs through work catalogued here, which likewise treats wholeness as prior to parts rather than assembled from them:
- Holistic Physics and Holistic Physics in a Self-Organizing Universe — argue for a physics in which organisation and wholeness are primary rather than emergent from independent constituents.
- On Measurements with Contradictory Results; Tracing the Roots of the Original Wholeness — traces contradictory measurement outcomes back to an underlying wholeness.
- Wholeness and the Implicate Order — Bohm's own book, catalogued here.
The shared conviction is that fragmentation is a methodological convenience mistaken for a discovery about nature, and that a physics built on separable parts will keep generating paradoxes at its foundations. Further material is indexed under Category:Quantum Theory.