David Bohm, the son of a Jewish furniture, was born in Pennsylvania on 20th December, 1917. He studied physics at Pennsylvania State University before completing his doctorate under Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California.

In 1943 Bohm joined the Manhattan Project in the United States. Over the next two years he worked with Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi, Felix Bloch, James Chadwick, James Franck, Emilio Segre, Eugene Wigner, Otto Frisch, Leo Szilard and Klaus Fuchs in developing the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After the war Bohm became assistant professor at Princeton University and published his book Quantum Theory (1951). At the university he worked closely with Albert Einstein and they had regularly meetings to discuss science and morality.

In 1949 Bohm refused to testify against Robert Oppenheimer before the House of Un-American Activities Committee. As a result Bohm was arrested and charged with contempt of Congress. He went on trial but was acquitted.

Bohm was sacked from his post at Princeton University and despite the efforts of Albert Einstein the authorities were unwilling to reinstate him. A victim of McCarthyism, Bohm was unable to find work in the United States and he therefore moved to Brazil where he became professor at the University of Sao Paulo. Bohm also taught in Israel before moving to Bristol, England in 1957.

In 1961 Bohm became professor of physics at Birkbeck College in London. Over the next thirty years Bohm's work focused mainly on the fundamentals of quantum theory and relativity theory. His books include Causality and Chance in Modern Physics (1957), The Special Theory of Relativity (1966), Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980) and Science, Order and Creativity (1987). David Bohm died in 1992.