David Peat

88 From Certainty to Uncertaintyproblem arises, Bohm felt, because the quantum world deals in process,transformation, and flux, whereas European languages deal withthe world in terms of nouns and concepts. What is needed is a trueprocess-language, a language rich in verbs and in which nouns occupya secondary, derivative place. Just as, in Bohm’s view, an electron is atemporary structure constantly appearing and disappearing into theholomovement, so too nouns and concepts in Bohm’s language are atbest provisional and unfold out of verbs.Bohm called this hypothetical language the “rheomode”—“rheo”referring to flowing. He even believed that it might be possible to usethe rheomode in conversation and persuaded some students to try itout. The experiment was not a great success. Having been dependenton nouns all their lives the students began employing the rheomode’sverbal structures to serve the function of nouns. It was only in the lastyears of his life that Bohm met with some Blackfoot people and realizedthat such a form of language had always been in existence. 5Language: Who Is Master?In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Humpty Dumpty admonishesAlice when she asks about the meaning of a word. For Humpty a wordmeans exactly what he wants it to mean, for, as he says, who is master—languageor he? Bertrand Russell wanted to follow in Humpty’sfootsteps with his logical atomism, by bending language to his intentionsand forcing it to mean exactly what he intended it to mean. As ayoung man Wittgenstein suggested that language creates pictures ofreality and, provided we restrict our statements to those that are similarto scientific propositions, it may be possible to say something preciseabout the world.5In fact Bohm’s ideas on language were anticipated several decades earlier by theArgentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius of 1940, Borgeswrites of a country peopled by Idealists (in the sense of the philosophy of BishopGeorge Berkeley) who doubt the existence of objects and even the continuity in spaceand time of the experiencing subject. Those living in the south of the country employa language consisting entirely of verbs.