Bohm-Biederman Correspondence

""It was sheer chance that I encountered David Bohm's writing in 1958 . . . I knew nothing about him. What struck me about his work and prompted my initial letter was his underlying effort to seek for some larger sense of reality, which seemed a very humanized" "search. This was further evidenced as our correspondence progressed, and he made the effort to communicate with me beyond the private language of physicists."" --Charles Biederman
In March of 1960, the artist Charles Biederman wrote a one page, spontaneous letter to David Bohm, the first of over four thousand pages of correspondence that ended in 1969. This first volume of the " Bohm-Biederman Correspondence, " including letters between 1960 and 1962, is a cultural document which traces the fascinating exchange between art and science, creativity and theory, a great physicist and an extraordinary artist.
One of the most important factors that triggered such intense correspondence between the two men was their shared interest in the natural world. Approaching nature from different angles, the perspectives of art and science meant that they complemented and in this sense needed each other in order to obtain a fuller understanding. The two men also felt a dissatisfaction with the dominant trends their fields. They shared the idea that both in art and in physics, traditional views of nature had become inadequate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the mainstream had failed to respond adequately to new situations.
These letters give readers a rare opportunity to engage in a remarkable transatlantic intellectual discussion between the prestigious physicist and a great artist.