David Bohm on his relations with Eugene Wigner and John Wheeler and the atmosphere at Princeton and CalTech.

Bohm:

Well, the physics was all right, yes, it was good. But the point is that — there was a fellow here who used to be in Birkbeck called Ehrenberg who said it didn’t matter how many people are in a department, the number that anybody knows is about the same no matter how big the department (laughter). You cannot actually get to know more than a few people, you see, I found that it had some good points and some difficult points; it was good that I could teach a course there in quantum mechanics and I wrote a book on the subject trying to clarify my understanding. I found having all these graduate students was good. Wigner and I were not hostile, but we’re not really close to each other in our way of thinking. That is, Wigner is far more formal. And Wheeler I could talk to a bit you see. I found the general atmosphere a little bit difficult in the same way as Cal Tech. There’s a lot of status consciousness, much more at the Institute than at the University. I felt that this status and security were often on people’s minds, you see. And this interfered with freedom of thought.