Personal Narrative: Implicate Order, Space And Time

Cait is of the age where it 's time for me to teach her how to drive. For as exhilarating as she finds her lessons, that 's how nerve-racking I find them. So when we get in the car for another lesson, I take comfort in the way she falls back into our usual "long drives" routine.

She starts with her customary opening line, "So what should we talk about, Mom?"

As Cait has a tendency to drive a little too close to the shoulder of the road, I say, "We should talk about how you should stop listing to the right and stay in the center of your lane!"

Cait makes the correction and says, "So Mom, me and my friends were talking about what would happen if someone really developed a time machine and went back in time."

"What do you think would happen?" I

"In the enfolded or implicate order, space and time aren 't the key factors that decide whether something acts dependently or independently--like your time machine going backward or forward in time.Which means that a very different kind of connection is possible between time and space, and stuff made out of particles--like us.

"Bohm, the guy who developed this theory, thinks that the main thing about understanding order--especially the space/time/particle order--is that the undivided whole, and the implicate order contained within that whole carries way more deterministic weight than the parts of the whole, such as particles, quantum states, and stuff like that.

"In fact, in Bohm 's mind, the whole encompasses everything, including form, abstract ideas, and processes. What this means is that parts could be physical things, such as atoms or subatomic particles, but they could also be abstract things, like quantum states. But whether they 're physical or abstract doesn 't matter because the parts have to be considered in terms of the whole, and as such, they act as relatively autonomous and independent "sub-totalities". Which means that nothing can be entirely separate or autonomous."

Cait asks, "Is that what you