BOHM-BIEDERMAN CORRESPONDENCE: Volume One: Creativity in Art and Science.(Review)(Brief Article)

David Bohm and Charles Biederman, edited by Paavo Pylkkanen. Routledge, $40 (253p) ISBN 0-415-16225-4.

Among the most disorienting intellectual developments of the 20th century were quantum mechanics and abstract painting. The new physics destroyed commonsense notions of causality and threatened to resurrect the shunned idea of action at a distance; meanwhile, schools of non-mimetic art questioned, as did the new science, the meaning of observation itself. Physicist Bohm, a familiar of Einstein, struggled to interpret the paradoxical new findings in a way that would preserve the integrity of the basic classical understanding, while Biederman, in his paintings and …