Implicate and explicate order

Implicate order and explicate order are ontological concepts for quantum theory coined by theoretical physicist David Bohm during the early 1980s. They are used to describe two different frameworks for understanding the same phenomenon or aspect of reality. In particular, the concepts were developed in order to explain the bizarre behavior of subatomic particles – behavior difficult to explain by quantum physics.

In his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Bohm uses these notions to describe how the same phenomenon might look different, or might be characterized by different principal factors, in different contexts such as at different scales. The implicate order, also referred to as the "enfolded" order, is seen as a deeper and more fundamental order of reality. In contrast, the explicate or "unfolded" order include the abstractions that humans normally perceive. As he writes:

The notion of implicate and explicate orders emphasizes the primacy of structure and process over individual objects. The latter are seen as mere approximations of an underlying process. In this approach, quantum particles and other objects are understood to have only a limited degree of stability and autonomy.

Bohm believes that the weirdness of the behavior of quantum particles is caused by unobserved forces, maintaining that space and time might actually be derived from an even deeper level of objective reality. In the words of F. David Peat, Bohm considers that what we take for reality are "surface phenomena, explicate forms that have temporarily unfolded out of an underlying implicate order". That is, the implicate order is the ground from which reality emerges.

David Bohm, his co-worker Basil Hiley, and other physicists of Birkbeck College worked toward a model of quantum physics in which the implicate order is represented in form of an appropriate algebra or other pregeometry. They considered spacetime itself as part of an explicate order that is connected to an implicate order that they called pre-space. The spacetime manifold and the properties of locality and nonlocality all arise from an order in such pre-space. A. M. Frescura and Hiley suggested that an implicate order could be carried by an algebra, with the explicate order being contained in the various representations of this algebra. (See also: Work by Bohm and Hiley on implicate orders, pre-space and algebraic structures.)

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