David Joseph Bohm was an American scientist, described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and who contributed unorthodox ideas to quantum theory and the philosophy of mind. Bohm advanced the view that quantum physics meant that the old Cartesian model of reality – that there are two kinds of substance, the mental and the physical, that somehow interact – was too limited. To complement it, he developed a mathematical and physical theory of "implicate" and "explicate" order, he believed that the brain, at the cellular level, works according to the mathematics of some quantum effects, postulated that thought is distributed and non-localised just as quantum entities are. Bohm warned of the dangers of rampant reason and technology, advocating instead the need for genuine supportive dialogue, which he claimed could broaden and unify conflicting and troublesome divisions in the social world. In this, his epistemology mirrored his ontology. Due to his Communist affiliations, Bohm was the subject of a federal government investigation in 1949, prompting him to leave the United States.
He pursued his scientific career in several countries, becoming first a Brazilian and a British citizen. He abandoned Marxism in the wake of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. Bohm's main concern was with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which according to Bohm is never static or complete. Bohm was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to a Hungarian Jewish immigrant father, Samuel Bohm, a Lithuanian Jewish mother, he was raised by his father, a furniture-store owner and assistant of the local rabbi. Despite being raised in a Jewish family, he became an agnostic in his teenage years. Bohm attended Pennsylvania State College, graduating in 1939, the California Institute of Technology, for one year, he transferred to the theoretical physics group directed by Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, where he obtained his doctorate. Bohm lived in the same neighborhood as some of Oppenheimer's other graduate students and with them became involved in radical politics.
He was active in communist and communist-backed organizations, including the Young Communist League, the Campus Committee to Fight Conscription, the Committee for Peace Mobilization. During his time at the Radiation Laboratory, Bohm was in a relationship with the future Betty Friedan and helped to organize a local chapter of the Federation of Architects, Engineers and Technicians, a small labor union affiliated to the Congress of Industrial Organizations. During World War II, the Manhattan Project mobilized much of Berkeley's physics research in the effort to produce the first atomic bomb. Though Oppenheimer had asked Bohm to work with him at Los Alamos, the project's director, Brigadier General Leslie Groves, would not approve Bohm's security clearance after seeing evidence of his politics and his close friendship with Weinberg, suspected of espionage. During the war, Bohm remained at Berkeley, where he taught physics and conducted research in plasma, the synchrotron and the synchrocyclotron.
He completed his Ph. D. in 1943 by an unusual circumstance. According to biographer F. David Peat, "The scattering calculations that he had completed proved useful to the Manhattan Project and were classified. Without security clearance, Bohm was denied access to his own work. To satisfy the University, Oppenheimer certified that Bohm had completed the research. Bohm performed theoretical calculations for the Calutrons at the Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, used for the electromagnetic enrichment of uranium for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. After the war, Bohm became an assistant professor at Princeton University, he worked with Albert Einstein at the nearby Institute for Advanced Study. In May 1949, the House Un-American Activities Committee called upon Bohm to testify because of his previous ties to suspected communists. Bohm invoked his Fifth Amendment right to refuse to testify, he refused to give evidence against his colleagues. In 1950, Bohm was arrested for refusing to answer the committee's questions.
He was acquitted in May 1951, but Princeton had suspended him. After his acquittal, Bohm's colleagues sought to have him reinstated at Princeton, but Princeton President Harold W. Dodds decided not to renew Bohm's contract. Although Einstein considered appointing him as his research assistant at the Institute, Oppenheimer "opposed the idea and advised his former student to leave the country." His request to go to the University of Manchester was unsuccessful. Bohm left for Brazil to assume a professorship of physics at the University of São Paulo, at Jayme Tiomno's invitation and on the recommendation of both Einstein and Oppenheimer. During his early period, Bohm made a number of significant contributions to physics quantum mechanics and relativity theory; as a postgraduate at Berkeley, he developed a theory of plasmas, discovering the electron phenomenon now known as Bohm diffusion. His first book, Quantum Theory, published in 1951, was well received among others, but Bohm became dissatisfied with the or
Half-A-Room is a 1967 conceptual artwork by the Japanese artist Yoko Ono. The work is made from various objects that have been painted white, it was made with the help of Ono's second husband, Anthony Cox, some local art students. The piece was first displayed at Ono's "Half-a-Wind" exhibition at the Lisson Gallery in West London in 1967. At the Lisson Gallery show the objects were accompanied by a row of glass bottles on a shelf with each bottle containing the words "Half a X" for each cut up object to represent their respective missing halves; the names in bottles was suggested by John Lennon, with Ono recognizing his contribution semi-anonymously with the inclusion of the label "J. L." underneath the bottles. The installation in Ono's 2014 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao contained: Half-a-Room was shown at Ono's exhibition from 10 November 2007 to 4 February 2008 at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in São Paulo; the work was shown at Ono's 1967 Half-a-Wind exhibition at the Lisson Gallery in Paddington, from 11 October to 14 November 1967.
The cost of the exhibition was underwritten by John Lennon. Ono had been to see Lennon's friend Pete Shotton, working for The Beatles company Apple Corps, had asked to borrow a few thousand pounds to fund the exhibition. Shotton told Ono that he "really not authorised to hand out two thousand quid like that" but upon asking Lennon, Shotton said that he "merely grunted the affirmative without further comment". Lennon described the exhibition as all "beautifully cut in half and painted white... That was our first public appearance, but I didn't go and see the show, I was too uptight". Half-A-Room has been described by Ono as a response to her feeling at the time that "there was a half empty space in my life" as a result of the increasing estrangement of her and her second husband, Anthony Cox. Ono awoke one day and noticed that Cox had not returned from a night out, so the bed was half empty, through this realised that there was "a half empty space in my life"; the magazine Another Magazine wrote in 2015 that the piece "speaks to the pointlessness of material things without the human connection that gives them meaning.
The emotional impact of the end of her relationship with Cox subsequently inspired Ono to make her piece Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting. In the accompanying exhibition text Some Notes on the Lisson Gallery Show, Ono wrote that "I think of this show as an elephant's tail.... Life is only half a game. Molecules are always at the verge of half emerging. Somebody said I should put half-a-person in the show, but we are halves already. It is sad. No matter how close we get to each other, there is always air between us, it is nice that we share the air. No matter how far apart we are, the air links us". In an audio guide recorded for Ono's 2015 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Ono said that "You see a room with little – a space between it. Instead of a room that's packed, you know, it has air between there.... In those days, I still didn't have a life of just being alone, and I thought, "This is a great one for a work of art to show to people that we're just half." Anyway, everything that I see here, the other half is invisible.
And that other half may be something that we might see one day, but now we don't see it"
Lucy Bradshaw is an American video game producer. She is the former senior vice president and general manager of Maxis, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts. Bradshaw worked at LucasArts and Activision before moving to Electronic Arts in 1997. Shortly afterward, Electronic Arts acquired Maxis, Bradshaw became an executive producer on SimCity 3000. Bradshaw became senior vice president of Maxis in 2013, after serving as the studio's general manager. Bradshaw oversaw development of SimCity, The Sims, Spore, she encountered controversy due to technical issues with the 2013 reboot of SimCity. In 2010, Fast Company named Bradshaw as one of the most influential women in technology. In 2013, Fortune named Bradshaw one of the 10 most powerful women in gaming. Bradshaw left Electronic Arts in 2015. Following her departure, she joined the Social VR team at Facebook, her former co-worker Rachel Franklin, who had taken over Bradshaw's position at Maxis, became head of the Social VR team in 2016