His name is David Bohm.
He is one of the most gifted theoretical physicists in the world. He studied under Oppenheimer. He worked closely with Einstein. The Princeton physics department had just recommended his reappointment.
The university fired him anyway.
Not because his physics was wrong. They never engaged in his physics. They attacked his politics, his judgment, his personality. Princeton’s president wrote, in an actual letter, that Bohm had failed to show “qualities of personality and judgment which should be expected of a member of its faculty.”
The man who certified Bohm’s PhD? Oppenheimer. The man who then advised him to leave the country? Also Oppenheimer.
Einstein wanted to hire him. That was blocked too.
The United States government confiscated his passport when he arrived in Brazil. He had to surrender his citizenship to stay. He wouldn’t get it back for thirty-five years.
Here is what was actually happening in those physics offices while Bohm packed his box.
The physics establishment was straw-manning him.
Not engaging the strongest version of his ideas. Not even engaging the weakest version. Just dismissing the man, his politics, his associations, his personality, so they never had to engage the ideas at all.
It worked. For decades.
His ideas are now cited tens of thousands of times. Surveys of physicists show his interpretation rivals Copenhagen in acceptance. He is increasingly seen, simply, as having been ahead of his time.
That’s what happens when you straw man something true. It doesn’t disappear. It just waits.
The straw man doesn’t destroy the argument. It delays the conversation.
There are only three ways to engage any argument. Most people only know one of them. Almost no one uses the third.
STRAW MAN Attack the weakest version of an argument, one you’ve weakened yourself, or one that never existed. Easy win. No learning. Pure performance.
With Bohm, the straw man was political. Don’t engage hidden variables theory. Just label the man a communist and let the climate do the rest. The argument is never addressed because the man is disqualified.
But the straw man doesn’t have to be political. It’s usually more subtle. You quote someone out of context. You attack the most extreme version of a position. You respond to what you wish they said rather than what they actually said.
The tell; would they recognize their own argument in your representation of it?
If not, you’re straw manning.
STEEL MAN Engage the strongest version of an argument, one you’ve made stronger than they did. Hard work. Real learning. Truth seeking.
What would it have looked like to steel man Bohm’s physics?
It would have started by acknowledging what the Copenhagen interpretation actually can’t explain. Not its successes, its genuine limits. The measurement problem. The collapse of the wave function. The role of the observer. These weren’t mysteries Bohr had solved. They were mysteries Bohr had decided not to ask about.
Bohm was asking about them.
A real engagement would have said: here is Bohm’s strongest case. He is proposing that beneath the probabilistic behavior we observe, there is a deeper order, implicate, enfolded, non-local, from which the world we measure emerges. He is not abandoning quantum mechanics. He is proposing it is incomplete. The strongest version of that argument is this…
And then engage that.
That never happened. Instead, the establishment pointed to von Neumann’s proof that hidden variables were impossible, a proof that itself contained an unexamined assumption that Bell would later expose. They were straw manning with mathematics. The form was rigorous. The presupposition was hidden.
STRONG MAN Use multiple frameworks from all angles, for and against, to triangulate toward truth. Not one opponent. Not one method. The full terrain.
Strong manning Bohm’s implicate order would still look different.
You don’t just defend it or attack it. You bring every available framework to bear on the question it’s trying to answer. What is the relationship between the quantum world and the world we experience?
For Bohm: the holographic principle supports the implicate order mathematically. Non-locality in quantum entanglement is exactly what you’d expect if there’s an enfolded order beneath apparent separation. The Aharonov-Bohm effect, which Bohm himself co-discovered, shows electromagnetic fields affecting particles through regions where the field has been shielded. Something is present that isn’t in the explicate order.
Against Bohm: the implicate order is empirically difficult to test. It risks becoming metaphysics dressed as physics. If everything is enfolded, what predictions does that change? Science needs falsifiability.
Navigating between: Bohm’s value may not be as a complete theory but as a corrective, a reminder that the Copenhagen decision to stop asking certain questions was a choice, not a conclusion. Some questions the establishment decided were unanswerable. Bohm kept asking them. Asking them turned out to matter.
That’s strong manning. You don’t arrive with a verdict. You arrive with a method. Truth emerges from the navigation, not the starting position
Most straw manning isn’t dishonest. It is just exhausting.
Engaging an idea at full strength costs something. You have to understand it well enough to make it better than its author did. You have to hold your own position loosely enough that the engagement could change it. You have to be willing to find out you were wrong.
That’s expensive. The straw man is cheap. Find the weakest version, demolish it, feel the win.
The physics establishment in 1952 had a working theory. It predicted experimental results. Careers were built on it. A young physicist from Berkeley was suggesting the foundations needed rethinking. The cheapest response, professionally, cognitively, institutionally, was to not engage the physics and discredit the man.
That’s not unique to physics. That’s how institutions protect themselves from uncomfortable ideas. And it’s how individuals protect themselves from the discomfort of being wrong.
When you are a straw man, you never find out if you’re wrong. That’s not a side effect. That’s the point.
Straw manning is how you win arguments. Steel manning is how you find the truth. Strong manning is how you hold complexity without collapsing it.
One practical test that cuts through everything. Would the person whose argument you’re engaging say you’ve represented them fairly?
Not that they would agree with your conclusion. Would they say you understood what they were actually claiming before you engaged in it?
Bohm, watching the physics establishment respond to his 1952 papers, said they never engaged with what he was actually proposing. They responded to a version of his argument that assumed he was trying to restore classical determinism. He wasn’t. He was trying to show that an alternative to Copenhagen was logically possible, that the “impossibility proofs” had hidden assumptions. The establishment responded to the wrong argument. Their win was against a position he didn’t hold.
That’s the tell. Every time.
Bohm eventually said something about his exile that nobody expected.
He said it liberated him. Once outside the Princeton physics establishment, outside the pressure to speak the language of other people, he could think more freely than he ever had inside the institution.
The straw man didn’t stop the idea. It just moved to Brazil. Then Israel. Then London. Then, slowly, everywhere.
His ideas are now part of how serious physicists think about the foundations of quantum mechanics. Bell’s theorem, which vindicated the core of what Bohm was pointing at, is considered one of the most important results in the history of physics.
Here’s what that means for you.
When you straw man, you don’t destroy the idea. You just delay the conversation. The truth doesn’t stop being true because you refused to engage it. It waits. And eventually, in Brazil, in London, in a paper published thirty years later, it finds its way back.
Steel manning costs more. Strong manning still costs more. But only one of the three gets you closer to what’s actually true.
@ Lee Greene