F. David Peat - Biography

I am writing this at my desk in our house in Pari, Italy. When I 
glance to the right I look though the door into the bedroom and 
out through the open window at the Tuscan hills. To my left is a 
window open onto Via Gonfienzo. Someone passes, sticks his 
head through the widow and sees me seated at the computer. "Ah, 
you're studying," he says, "you like books."


Our house is not very large, two small bedrooms, a living room 
and a kitchen. Below is the Cantina where we keep books, olive oil 
and some wine. Walking round the village, doing the "giro" as they 
say, need only take five or ten minutes but some times it can last 
up to two hours as I meet people, gossip or have a coffee at the 
bar. 


Pari is located about 5 kilometers off the main road between Siena 
and Grosseto. Being off the highway means we have few visitors, 
except during the Festa in August and the Sagra of September 
when tables are put out in the streets for everyone to eat. Around 
two hundred and fifty people live in Pari, which means I can get to 
know everyone. But in July and August there can be as many as a 
thousand with aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, grand 
children and cousins coming to visit.


So here I am in the Tuscan hills, far away from London, New 
York, Ottawa or Paris. I have a CD player, a library full of books, 
a fax machine, a modem and a old laptop in black and white, 
without a graphics or audio card. We have little money but eat 
excellent food, breathe fresh air and look out on beauty. How did I 
get here?


I was born in Waterloo, a suburb of Liverpool, on April 18, 1938. 
Part of my early childhood was spent being woken in the middle of 
the night and carried into a damp and smelly air raid shelter. Two 
persistent dreams remained from that period, at least until the 
middle of my life. One was of looking up into the night sky. 
Suddenly the stars begin to move and I experience a shifting of my 
axis. It was only in 1971, during a power strike in London when 
the city was plunged into darkness, that I saw, within a dark sky, 
the lights of aircraft bound for Heathrow or Gatwick. It was then 
that I realized my dream involved an early memory of searchlights 
and tracer bullets in the sky.


Another dream is about a forgotten crime revealed by the digging 
up of a dead body. What Freudian meaning could this contain? In 
the dream, and almost at the moment of waking, I was clothed in 
the sense that I must have done something truly terrible in the past, 
something so dark that it had been repressed from my 
consciousness.


This time the historical origins of dream revealed itself shortly 
before my mother died. It dated back to the war days, a time of 
heavy rationing. Somehow my father had obtained a turkey, no 
doubt on the Black Market. But by Christmas Eve the bird had 
begun to stink. As this incident was mentioned memories flooded 
back - a whispered conversation in the kitchen. How could they 
dispose of the carcass, which my grandmother jokingly referred to 
as "the body"? At that time snoopers examined the contents of 
dustbins and there was a heavy fine for people who threw away 
food, maybe even imprisonment for those dealing in the Black 
Market. When it was dark my father went into the garden, dug a 
hole and "buried the body", with jokes about people digging it up 
in the future. I remember my fear that somehow the crime would 
be revealed and my father would be arrested and taken away. 


Two dreams and two interpretations that refer to real, traumatic 
events in the past. Yet these dreams are also doors into something 
darker and deeper. Needless to say, after the actual historical 
correspondences had been revealed the repeated occurrence of the 
dreams vanished.


A happier memory of war time was the availability of live 
ammunition and the magnesium casing from incendiary bombs. But 
this would be a few years after the war when I was bigger. I never 
messed with bullets as some boys did. Anyway my mother had 
hidden my father's bullets as being too dangerous so that when, as 
a member of the Home Guard, he was called on to scour some 
waste land in search of a German who had supposedly landed by 
parachute, he had to plead with my mother to give him back his 
bullets. Needless to say he found no enemy agents, but at the end 
of the war he was given a medal for his bravery in "sustaining 
injury while fighting for King and Country". He fell over while 
climbing over a wall with his rifle and broke his little finger.


But back to business. A chunk of magnesium could be lit by 
playing the flame of a Bunsen burner on it - but once lit it burned 
though the tripod and began to melt its way though the kitchen 
floor. But that was really pretty mild stuff when compared to the 
sort of thing I got up to in the coal shed - making gases, powerful 
acids and once, convinced I had made nitroglycerin, I spent the rest 
of the day lurking in my bedroom. Then there was the time I 
attempted the polymerization of Bakelite and filled the house with 
dense black smoke that lingered for a couple of days and caused us 
to go to my auntie's house. Or the time my electrical experiments 
required me to by-pass the fuse box at the front of the house with 
the result that I blacked out a small area of Waterloo.


But only part of the time was spent in the coal shed because I was 
a very sickly child - there was a high degree of neurosis in the 
home and my mother was a professional invalid in incredibly frail 
health until her death at the age of 90. And so I was in an out of 
hospital for minor operations and once for several weeks I was 
kept home and out of school. This may well have been "a touch of 
TB". It was only spoken of in whispers since TB was associated 
with poverty. Being in bed meant being off school and being able 
to read as many books as I wanted. Or, when I got bored, traveling 
in my imagination, playing with soldiers, or my toy farm. Or 
rigging up a pulley system in my bedroom so that I could transport 
toys up to the curtain rail and back. Hour after hour, day after day, 
I would lie in bed, listening to the sounds of children playing 
outside, watching the shadows move across the bedroom ceiling.


I was in many ways a solitary child who lived much in the 
imagination, although I got on very well with adults and had a 
group of younger children who I organized into playing the 
Olympic Games. It was around this age I stood under a street lamp 
and wondered if the light went on for ever and ever and ever. Or if 
it reached the end of the universe then how would it travel? Would 
it simply go on making more and more space.


I had learned about science from a book in Aunt and Uncle's home. 
It was called "The Marvels and Mysteries of Science" and they 
used to read it to me before I was able to read for myself, and 
show me the cut-away drawings of the inside of the earth, sun and 
atom. Their home in Hunts Cross was an idyl for me. This suburb, 
to the south east of Liverpool, lay outside the main bomb run for 
aircraft and there, as a small child, I could sleep at night without 
the need to go into an air raid shelter. My aunt delighted in self-
education and possessed a set of red bound "Universal 
Encyclopedias". In the afternoon, when I took my rest, we'd 
discuss Plato, the notion of forms, and the running of an ideal 
society. I also became interested in the problem of evil and how it 
originated in the world.


In was as a small boy that I first experienced the physicality of a 
paradigm shift. I had constructed my own cosmology, put together 
though scraps of overhead conversation, and believed that we were 
literally inside the earth. The earth was like a ball, but a hollow 
ball. Inside was the sky, sun and stars. One looked "up" into the 
sky by looking to the centre of the cosmos. If one dug holes in the 
garden, as I did, one would go on forever.


Then one night, lying in my bed at my Aunt's house and about to 
go to sleep, she make a remark which indicated that we were on 
the surface of the ball and that the sky was not inside but above. 
That moment my entire vision of the cosmos shifted in such a 
sudden and profound movement that I felt it as a physical shifting 
of my insides, a moment of total vertigo. I don't think that at any 
time since have I ever experienced a transformation in my thinking 
as profound.


The school I went to was only average, and maybe even below 
average, but in many ways I was lucky not to have been given a 
good education, and not to be exposed to a rounded culture 
because it meant that everything that was valuable to me had to be 
sought out, rather than being presented to me on a plate. It was for 
this reason, this lack of a background, that I heard Beethoven's 
Choral symphony just as it's first audience must have heard it. This 
was many years later, when I was 16 or 17. My friends and I, by a 
circuitous route, had begun to listen to classical music. We began 
by collecting 78s of trad jazz - Humphry Litttleton, Ken Colyer 
and Chris Barber and moved on, past the bop revolution to the 
Modern Jazz Quartet. The liner notes of one of the MJQ's LPs 
referred to the introduction of "Softly as in a Morning Sunrise" as 
being played in counterpoint to a cannon from Bach's "Musical 
Offering". This meant we had to investigate Bach and so I listened 
to his fugues and Musical Offering. From we jumped around to 
Holst's "The Planets", Stravinsky's "The Right of Spring", Anton 
von Webern and Haydn. My friend Clem listened to Beethoven and 
at his house he would play the Eroica, and numbers 5 and 7. 


Then, one day Clem said, "Do you know Beethoven wrote a ninth 
symphony?" He put a pile of 78s on his turntable and we sat down 
to listen together. "Just wait till you get to the last movement", he 
warned me. And so I listened, and the last movement began 
and...what's this?...people are singing...this has never happened 
before... a symphony is supposed to be just an orchestra playing, 
not singers and a choir! I was totally shocked. I was like that 
woman at the first performance of one of Bach's passion who 
fainted from shock in the church. 


But that's jumping ahead a few years. Let me go back to being 11 
or 12. Because of so many days off school I didn't do that well in 
my first years at Grammar School. Yet I soon discovered that the 
things I really wanted to know about were better self-taught. By 
my final years at school I was mostly teaching myself, getting 
books out of the library, and even reading them in class. I 
remember the sky falling in on me one day when a physics teacher 
discovered me trying to read a book hidden under my desk. With 
triumph he waved it in the air only to discover, to his shock, it was 
Bertrand Russel's "The ABC of Relativity", or maybe James Jeans's 
"Mysterious Universe". Even his attempt at sarcasm fell flat, "well, 
boy if you spent more time on your physics than you do 
reading....erm...physics, you'd do pretty well."


But there were two teachers who, in different ways, challenged 
me. One was "Mr. Edwards", the art teacher, who used to talk to 
me about art as if I was an equal. Most other teachers protected 
themselves with the armor of sarcasm. But at an art gallery, or 
when looking over the work of a more promising student, he 
would ask me, "What do you think of that?" "Or why is this one so 
successful?" and he would listen to my comments and appear to 
take them seriously.


The other was "Dicky Blink" the physics teacher of the anecdote 
above. His lessons were rigorous but by contrast the physics labs 
were open and far more creative than anything I later met at 
university. In a university lab experiment one focuses on a 
measurement, or effect, and the apparatus is provided. For our 
final two years of school Dicky Blink expected us to work out how 
something was to be measured, collect the apparatus from his 
stock room, and set it up on the bench. If there was anything in 
particular we wanted to look into he was perfectly willing to allow 
us to spend the next few weeks trying to build the necessary 
apparatus. But he was a holy terror. If I was, for example, 
measuring the value of a resistance by using a Wheatstone Bridge, 
he would creep up behind me. Rip out several wires and say, "Now 
put them all back, but justify to me exactly where you are 
connecting them."


University was something of a disappointment to me. I'd really 
expected something better, more intensity, more enthusiasm. In 
many ways it was no better than school, we were just older, but 
still sitting listing to lectures that had been repeated year after year. 
I thought I'd be learning about new knowledge and interacting with 
professors but instead it was the same old, predigested stuff. In 
fact I was not at all clear as to which direction to take. I was 
fascinated by the ideas and imagination of physics, but on the other 
hand I loved the alchemical quality of chemistry - at least the 
chemistry done in the dark interior of the coal shed at home. In the 
end I settled for chemistry and at first I did very well but towards 
the end of my second year I began to have anxiety crises that 
caused me to leave the examination rooms in a panic. 


Towards the end of my degree year I began talking to one of the 
professors and persuaded him to take me on as an assistant over 
the summer. He was working on what are called redox reactions 
and using a spectrometer, NMR and EPR to follow the reactions. 
During this period I also began giving talks about art to one of the 
science clubs and tried writing art criticism for a university 
magazine.


My summer period extended and by now I was involved in 
research for a PhD in experimental chemistry. But I had also been 
talking to a theoretical physicist called Tom Grimley. Grimley had 
been an experimental physicist at Bristol University in the glory 
days of Frochlich, Pierels and Bohm. It was Frochlich who had 
suggested Grimley should become a theoretical physics. 


Grimley once told me of the time he stood next to Dirac as they 
watched the opening of a theoretical physics conference. "It's hard 
to believe that so many great minds are gathered in one room", 
said Grimley by way of an opening. "There aren't." replied Dirac.


At that time I was studying Dirac's book on quantum theory and 
reading David Hume - the latter mainly because I had heard that 
Einstein read Hume as a young man. I was also playing around 
with very simple theoretical problems. I can remember, it must 
have been in my early undergraduate years, inventing a method to 
calculate the energies of atoms and showing it to Grimley. He 
smiled when he saw it telling me I'd invented what Hartree had 
done many decades before.


>From time to time small theoretical problems came up in the 
experimental work of our group and rather than passing them on to 
the theoreticians I said I'd work them out myself. In this way I 
came up with a series of coupled differential equations for what I 
now realize must have been a non-linear chemical reaction, one in 
which concentrations oscillate rather than decrease exponentially. I 
had already noticed this fluctuation experimentally but was told to 
repeat my observations with more care as I simply was not cut out 
to be an experimentalist. "Good experimentalists" had note books 
filled with those observations that confirmed what they expected to 
see.


And so I decided to solve the equations numerically and took them 
to a computer called DEUCE. DEUCE must have been the child of 
Turing's ACE. It was really a room. You worked inside DEUCE. 
Its long term memory was a revolving magnetic drum. Its short 
term memory took the form of acoustic signals traveling in tubes of 
mercury cooled by fans. 


The machine was programmed by punching holes in cards, and the 
calculations I was doing had to be carried out in sections, with 
intermediate data being emitted in more punched cards. If I kept 
the calculation going on for too long then DEUCE would heat up 
and its memory become confused as odd digits crept in. Of course 
I now know that the sort of equations I was dealing with were not 
at all well behaved and the numerical approximations would be 
overwhelmed by butterfly effects.


Grimley hinted that I should think about giving up experiment and 
taking up theory and so I quickly wrote up my experimental results 
as a MSc and began to work on the theory of density matrices. 
Again most of what I needed to know as a theoretician had to be 
self taught. I really didn't have the time to attend lectures. But I did 
enjoy the theoretical seminars in the physics tower. This was 
mainly because of the presence of Herbert Frochlich, who by now 
had left Bristol to become professor of theoretical physics at 
Liverpool. Frochlich would sit in the centre of the front row and, 
about 2 mins into any seminar would mumble, "that's not going to 
work" and then appear to go to sleep. 50 mins later, in the question 
period, he would awake and seem to continue his sentence, "it's 
not going to work because.." and then approach the blackboard to 
demonstrate the differential equations involved were analogous to 
ones used in hydrodynamics, or some other totally unrelated field, 
and therefore would yield such and such a result. I also enjoyed 
taking the train to Manchester to attend the theoretical seminars of 
Edwards.


Towards the end of my PhD I began to think about where I should 
go next. The main thing was to get out of England and explore 
somewhere new. Little did I know it, but the Swinging Sixties had 
just began. I was more locked into the memory of England of the 
boring fifties and failed to anticipate the enormous in British films, 
theatre, art and popular music.


The fifties were never like that. To be at all different one listened 
to jazz. There was a jazz club in Liverpool called The Cavern. We 
all thought that the rot had set in when The Cavern stopped 
booking jazz groups and became a haven for some new type of 
popular music. In the fifties British pop music was no more than 
local groups covering each hit record from the States and even 
attempting American accents. So I didn't take the groups that 
began to appear at the Cavern at all seriously. Of course I'd hear 
about them. My father, who was an electrician and later 
maintenance manager at Blackler's Store in Liverpool, had a young 
apprentice. One day he informed me, as a sort of cautionary tale, 
that the apprentice had told him he was going to quit and go with 
his friends to play in Germany. My father tried to argue him out of 
such a stupid move and, in the end, told him, "George Harrison, 
one day you'll come back to me, crawling on your knees and 
begging for a job." 


One of my closest friends was Dot Courtie, we used to talk for 
hours on the way home from the tennis club on a Sunday. We 
really believed that our tiny group of friends - Dot, Clem (the same 
Clem who is the A.J. Ford who many years later co-authored a 
paper with me that you'll find in the essay section) and a few others 
were going to change the world and become some fantastic new 
movement like the Beats. After school she went to Liverpool 
College of Art. Later she ran off with one of her teachers, Austin 
Davis, the husband of Beryl Bainbridge, the novelist to be. Years 
later, when I read Bainbridge's "Another Part of the Wood" I 
realised that the character Dotty was my old friend Dot. Other 
characters in that novel are Frochlich and his wife.


One day Dot told me she'd met someone really interesting at Art 
School. At first I felt a bit put out by her enthusiasm for this 
student, John Lennon. A bit later, when Dot was at Goldsmiths 
College we were all supposed to meet but by then John Lennon 
and the Beatles had become too famous. Dot is mentioned in one 
of the Lennon biographies where her nose is described in an 
uncomplimentary manner.


But there was no reason, at that time, for me to anticipate such a 
surge of energy in England. I wanted to be off. We'd all read 
Kerouac's "On the Road" and made great plans to travel. My friend 
Clem had spent summers grape picking in France and Spain. We 
made a joke that we'd meet in 1970 in Mexico City - just like 
Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac. And in fact that happened. 
Clem, who was later to become a professor of linguistics and the 
University of Montreal, had been working and hitching around 
South America. On his way north into Canada he ran out of money 
and was staying in a hotel, the sort used as a brothel, in Mexico 
City. He happened to see a notice for a physics meeting and 
decided to walk towards the conference centre. I was attending the 
conference and walking down the road in the other direction. We 
met, after not seeing each other for years, as if it was perfectly 
normal. We had two great days in Mexico City and I gave him 
enough money to make it by bus to Canada.


Clem, Pete Cally and the rest of us used to go to a cottage my 
father and uncle had bought in North Wales. There we're talk all 
night and read Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs and read aloud 
excepts from "Howl". Ironically a matter of months after I'd left 
England, and England, that Ginsberg appeared at a poetry reading 
in Liverpool and announced that the city was "the centre of the 
world".


Anyway, I just wanted to get out. But where? Paris seemed a good 
idea. I was a bit like the characters in Julian Barnes's "Metroland". 
Anything to do with France was exotic. My spoken French was 
crap but I could read Camus, Cocteau's plays and all that poetry- 
Villon, Beaudelaire, Verlain, Rimbaud, Aragon..and then there 
were the Impressionists, and the Surrealists and .. the list went on 
so Paris was obviously the place to go. Earlier I'd also heard about 
Sartre and the existentialists. I wasn't quite sure of their philosophy 
except it involved talking, dressing in dark clothes, listening to 
modern jazz, snapping your fingers to applaud, and drinking a lot 
of coffee in late night bars.


And so I went to Paris on a short visit, stayed in a hotel on the Rue 
Blanch and wandered around Monmartre at night, climbing to the 
top and seeing the lights of Paris below. I also tried to visit all the 
jazz clubs in Paris. (At that time union restrictions limited the 
American jazz musicians who could play in England.)


Did anyone see the film, "Round Midnight?". It's about the bop 
pianist Budd Powell and his days at the Blue Note in Paris. In the 
film Powell was played as a tenor man, by a real jazz musician, 
Dexter Gordon.


Anyway one night I wandered into the Blue Note and there he 
was, Budd Powell, the man who had played with Bird and Dizzy, 
one of the inventors of bop. There he was, playing with just bass 
and drums. The club was virtually empty and the few people who 
were there seemed to be talking to each other and not bothering to 
listen. There was a table on the stage, to the left, and there I sat for 
as long as I could make one drink last and not get thrown out. I 
was really digging the music, my whole body moving and 
applauding at the end of each piece. Powell seemed somewhat 
amused and at the end of the set made a sort of little bow towards 
me. 


Ok, so Paris looked pretty neat. A foreign language, wine, jazz, 
real food and what's more I could go to the Institut Henri 
Poincare. I'd already become interested in fundamental problems, 
questions that were partly philosophical, and Poincare himself had 
embodied such an approach. And so I wrote to the Institute and 
began to apply. The other possibility was to go to the University of 
California at San Diego which didn't look too far, on my map at 
least, from San Francisco which, as everyone knew, was "home of 
the Beats."


But then I saw an advertisement for fellowships at Queen's 
University, Canada and one of the topics mentioned was "density 
matrices" - exactly my field. I wasn't too sure about Canada 
because it was neither France nor San Francisco. On the other 
hand I'd been much impressed by the ending of the movie "Scott of 
the Antarctic", with men fighting the bitter cold and sleeping in 
tents. I assumed that Canada must be like that, an ignorant 
prejudice confirmed by the sorts of photographs they displayed on 
the walls of the Canadian consulate in Liverpool. And so I decided 
on Canada.


It was an ill fated arrival. The car I'd rented to drive to Manchester 
Airport broke down and I missed my flight. I was routed via New 
York and spent some time 'in transit" without any American 
money. When I did reach in Montreal I had not realised that a 
public holiday was about to start so when I finally arrived, next 
day, at Queen's University, everything was shut.


What was worse, there was no snow and that weekend I got a 
really bad sunburn - a fate for all White English who expose their 
bodies to the sun in North America or the Mediterranean countries.


Now I'd better talk about Density Matrices because that's what 
brought me to Canada, for the one or two years of a post doctoral. 
Eventually I stayed there for thirty years and only once did I sleep 
out in the snow - just once I celebrated New Year at -25 degrees in 
a tent and with a down sleeping bag. It felt extremely warm. Scott 
of the Antartic's problem was that he didn't take the proper food to 
heat his body.


Since most people will not be at all interested in density matrices 
they'd be well advice to skip the next few paragraphs below and 
start reading where something more interesting comes along.


So, what was it about density matrices that kept me occupied for 
so long? When you think of a quantum system you probably think 
of its wave function. The wave function is the complete description 
of a pure quantum state. But, in a way, the wave function contains 
too much information. After all, we know about quantum systems 
because of the observations we make on them and to every 
observation, every set of numbers, there corresponds an 
"expectation value". Normally expectations values would be 
calculated by the wave function and the appropriate operator, i.e. 
the Hamiltonian if we need to know a system's energy. But it turns 
out that we can calculate all these expectation values exactly using 
a much simpler function called the reduced density matrix.


While the wave function, for an N particle system, is defined over 
N coordinates, the reduced density matrix, or 2-matrix, is defined 
over only 4 coordinates. In this sense it contains a lot less 
information - in a way it's a sort of "zipped" or "compressed" wave 
function - and all the physics we ever need to know about a system 
is contained in this compressed form.


I found that very interesting. That notion that the physics of a 
situation is enfolded within the density matrix. Probably that's why, 
when I later met David Bohm, I found his notion of the Implicate 
Order to be familiar. It also has great practical implications because 
it means one can store exact information about a quantum system 
in a compressed form....but there turns out to be a fly in the 
ointment called the N-Representability problem. 


In real life one never works with a complete wave function, in the 
sense of having the complete package of data. With the exception 
of the wave functions for the hydrogen atom physicists are forced 
to use approximations. These approximations are very good indeed 
and with them one can calculate, for example, the energy of an 
atom or molecule to a high degree of accuracy. Then, by tweaking 
away at this approximate wave function one can make it approach 
the true wave function as close as one desires - ie for as long as 
one wants the calculation to run.


If the approximation is not too good the energy will be too high, 
but by adding more and more refinements to the wave function the 
energy keeps dropping to approach the true energy. The Variation 
method works because theory dictates that the trial energy can 
never drop below the true energy. In other words the true energy is 
a lower bound than can be reached as close as desired but not 
exceeded. All that one has to do to ensure that this method works 
is that the approximate, or trial, wave function has the correct 
symmetry, called antisymmetry. Thus it is a global property of the 
wave function, it's overall form, that allows scientists to make 
highly accurate appoximations via computer calculations.


In the case of the 2-matrix things are very different. Remember 
that it is like a highly compressed version of the wave function. But 
which wave function? How can we be sure that it has been 
compressed, mapped down, from an N-particle wave function with 
the correct symmetry? What if this density matrix we have been 
handed comes from a wave function which does not have full 
antisymmetry? In this case when we calculate the system's energy it 
will violate the variation principle and drop below the true value. 
We think the answer is getting better, because the energy keeps 
falling but in fact it has violated a supposed lower bound.


This is the N-Representability problem: how to discover all the 
conditions that must be placed on a trial density matrix to ensure it 
has been zipped down from a well behaved wave function. It's not 
at all difficult to come up with all manner of necessary conditions 
but to find one that is sufficient is a different matter.


At Queens, and later at the National Research Council of Canada, i 
would think about N-Representability. Others tended to see it as a 
problem to be solved. For my part I thought it was not so much a 
problem as a clue, a signpost to the way notions of symmetry and 
of expectation values are entwined within each other. It made me 
realize the deep significance of form in Quantum Theory. I could 
see this because of form the wave function is non-separable 
(because of its anti-symmetry) and this non-separability leads to the 
famous Bell Theorem - the non-local correlations of distant 
electrons, for example. Clearly there is a deep connection between 
N-Representability and Bell's Theorem. It is also interesting to see 
the way a 2-matrix takes on a special form for coherent systems 
like a superconductor.


So that's the density matrix. I played around with those ideas for a 
few years yet no one seemed particularly interested. At the same 
time I also began thinking about fundamental questions in quantum 
theory and wondering why, after so many decades, there was no 
natural marriage between quantum theory and general relativity. 


I decided to teach myself something about General Relativity and 
became interested in how thermodynamics would work around 
Black Holes. I'd been reading Wheeler and Feynman's "absorber 
theory of radiation" and wondered how that would apply near an 
event horizon - this was before I realised that one of Wheeler's 
students, Beckenstein, was also dealing with the thermodynamics 
of Black Holes and Hawking was thinking about particle pair 
creation near Black Hole.


I'd also got interested in the way Action Principles had been used 
as a way of deriving the field equations of General Relativity and 
was playing around with some ideas of my own. Of course most of 
this was done in secret because by now I had moved to Ottawa and 
was part of the National Research Council of Canada, an 
organization which had decided to devote itself to what was called 
"mission oriented research", as opposed to the low priority 
"curiosity oriented research" which was what I was doing.


By 1971 I was due for a sabbatical so I wrote around trying to find 
out who was doing the most interesting work. The answer came 
back, Roger Penrose, who at that time was in the mathematics 
department of Birkbeck College, London.


So in the late spring of 1971 I and my family took a boat for 
England and spend the next nine months in London. 


In London we stayed in a very tiny porter's flat attached to 
Pentland House, a women's residence for Goldsmith's college. At 
Birkbeck I went to Penrose's Monday seminars and just sat there 
and enjoyed the way his mind worked and the incredible way he 
seemed to be able to visualize light cones in many dimensions 
intersecting spheres in even high dimensions. When I wasn't at 
Birkbeck I was going to the theatre, attending the Prom's season, 
and haunting the art galleries. I also started to read Carl Jung. Over 
the Christmas vacation all the young women left and I would sit in 
a big room next to the library, the gas stove bubbling, a bottle of 
wine by my side, and read Jung.


One day I went over the Birkbeck's physics department to visit an 
ex-PhD student of mind, David Schrum. I walked into the 
Graduate Room and....but you can find that story and many others 
in Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm (see 
Bibliography)...saw an older man talking about The Absolute. A 
student was arguing with him but the older man, who turned out to 
be David Bohm, was leading him on in a somewhat Socratic way, 
"So, you say there is no Absolute. Is that an Absolute statement?"


When he left the room I walked after him and stopped him as he 
was about to enter his office. I must have approached him with 
considerable intensity because he agreed that we should begin 
talking together. And so once or twice a week I would meet him 
after lunch and we would talk into the early evening when I would 
walk him to his tube state at Goodge Street. Over the next weeks 
we talked about quantum theory, time, order, causality, the 
Implicate Order until one afternoon, while sitting in the garden at 
Pentland House, it suddenly struck me that everything we had been 
talking about was really an expression of the structuring nature of 
human consciousness. In excitement I telephoned him saying, 
"We've got to talk about Mind, we've got to talk about 
consciousness." At that time I did not realise that the nature of 
consciousness was something he was pursuing with great intensity. 
Our discussions continued until I returned to Ottawa and once 
back at the National Research Council!


 I invited Bohm to come as a guest of NRC for the following 
summer.


Back in Canada I now wanted to explore ideas in a number of 
different ways. Not simply through scientific research, the sort of 
research that ends up being published in a physics journal but 
through a variety of different approaches. In terms of physics I was 
still interested in the quantum measurement problem and 
speculated about developing structures on Hilbert Space that 
would lead to a sort of pre-phase space. At one point I attended an 
exciting conference in Boston - a small, closed meeting with Dirac, 
Wheeler, Penrose, Finkelstein and a few others. Later that summer 
I invited David Finkelstein to spend a month or two at the NRC. 
But I was also interested in the wider implication of ideas, and how 
they connected to other areas like art, psychology and philosophy.


I'd always had connections to the art world though friends like 
Brydon Smith at the National Gallery of Canada. At the time I had 
a VW station wagon and remember picking up people like Dan 
Flavin and Jim Rosenquist and ferrying them round Ottawa. It was 
through these connections I began to ask artists, like Norman 
White, to drop in at NRC and talk to people, or simply hang out 
for a bit. I even had a plan to invite John Cage, I thought it would 
be interesting to explore the idea of chance in music and chance in 
quantum theory.


I'd never met Cage but earlier I'd had an encounter with his 
entourage. It was during a physics conference at Brown University 
where, nearby, there was an art exhibition. One evening David 
Tudor, Nam June Pike, Robert Rauschenberg and Charlotta 
Morman held a staged event. Earlier, over dinner, I'd sat with the 
German artist Hans Hacker and we'd got on well together and then 
sat talking with Rauschenberg, Tudor and Morman. When the time 
came for them to go on stage they were lacking someone to act as 
"music stand" for a piece where Morman placed her cello in 
Rauschenberg's stomach - later she immersed herself in a tank of 
water to play "The Swan". It was fun, in a very small way, to touch 
the edge of Fluxus in an experiential way. 


There were other avenues to explore as well. Back in London I 
had sent a letter to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation saying 
I was interested in writing some scripts for radio. A month or two 
after I had returned to Ottawa I received a phone call from a 
producer, Paul Buckley, who asked me if I was still interested as 
he would be in Ottawa the following Thursday. Thursday came and 
Paul and I talked over ideas. "Why not write a one hour script on 
the idea of order in physics?", he suggested. That seemed a good 
idea, "How many weeks do I have?"


"Oh, it has to be broadcast next Monday. We'll be recording it all 
Sunday, so have it ready by Saturday night."


That came as something of a shock, I'd never written a radio script 
in my life. But the best work comes at moments of crisis and when 
you have no idea of how to proceed so you must create everything 
afresh. I immediately left the office and went home to bed. I had no 
idea what to do but during the night, and in bed the following 
morning, I began to hear voices in my head. I just wrote down 
what they said and spent Friday evening and Saturday morning 
editing what I, or they, had written. By Sunday morning my family 
and I, plus two friends, when into the CBC studios in the Chateau 
Laurier, Ottawa and recorded the program. It was broadcast and 
later nominated for a radio documentary prize.


One more thing... I had written the piece in a circular form and 
began with the Ricercare from Bach's Musical Offering - this was 
in the days before Hofstadter. I ended it with Webern's 
transcription of the same piece. So in coming full circle the idea 
were also being taken through a new transformation. In many ways 
that program was a condensation of all the ideas I had explored 
over the years, with Bohm, with Penrose and back even to my 
school days.


Several years later Bohm was invited to a conference at Carleton 
University. At the end of the meeting we all assembled at a Fish 
Restaurant - Paul Buckley, who had been my director for the radio 
documentary, was sitting on one side of me and Bohm on the 
other. So many of us were reunited for that one hour. Suddenly, 
though all the conversation I began to get a curious uneasy feeling. 
I asked everyone to stop talking and, very faintly, we all hear a 
radio playing. It must have been tuned in to CBC-FM because it 
was playing the Ricercare from The Musical Offering. 


That was a very strange moment for me, a moment beyond words. 
Later I was to write a book based around Carl Jung's concept of 
Synchronicity. After the book was published people kept asking 
me if I experienced synchronicities in my own life and I generally 
said, no. But when I think back to that music in the restaurant, and 
if I'm pushed, well....


Later Paul and I were to make other programs together. The most 
ambitious involved a trip round Europe and the US to conduct 
interviews with Dirac, Heisenberg, Rosenfeld, Wheeler, Penrose, 
Bohm and many others for twenty one-hour programs on the 
history of twentieth century physics.


In the midst of all this flurry with artists, scientists and radio David 
Bohm arrived and he and his wife spent two months in a small 
apartment hotel in the centre of Ottawa. Each morning, when I 
picked him up, was the start of a day-long discussion that took 
place partly in my office at NRC and partly during our long walks 
together. It was on these walks that he revealed his uncertainty 
about which direction to pursue. He had always loved doing 
physics, but was that really the right road to the sort of questions 
that interested him most deeply - questions about the nature of 
human conscious and its transformation? Maybe these 
conversations resonated with own uncertainties. While most of my 
time was taken up investigating fundamental problems in physics I 
could see that there were other ways of making an investigation, 
other methods and other paths. Did I have to be confined to just 
one? Or would these apparently different approaches end up 
reinforcing and complementing each other?


........TO BE CONTINUED........................