Quantum potential meets the dynamic universe | May 2025

This was an interactive meeting where ideas about general relativity, cosmology and quantum mechanics were shared, and a lot of time was left to discussions.  The starting point was the  by , which was linked to the approach of  and , and other approaches which were presented.

Suntola is a Finnish physicist, who is best known as the inventor and developer of atomic layer deposition (ALD). He was awarded the in May 2018 for this invention, which has enabled more efficient, smaller and lower energy microprocessors and memory chips, and thus pocket-sized computers (smartphones). However, for many years Suntola has been focusing on something very different, namely developing a Dynamic Universe (DU) theory as a new framework for physics.

The basic idea of DU is that if one describes the three-dimensional space as the ‘surface’ of a four-dimensional ball, the dynamics of space as a whole can be solved, and any local state of motion and gravitation in space can be related to the motion and gravitation of space as a whole. Relativity appears as a direct consequence of the conservation of the total energy in space, and so, for example, atomic clocks in motion or near mass centers run slower because part of their energy is bound to the local motion or gravitation. We wish to stimulate critical yet constructive analysis of DU’s theoretical structure and empirical adequacy and explore how it can be linked to the investigations of the other participants. For more info about DU, see

Besides DU, the workshop explored related issues such as 

• Is Dark Energy evolving?  - Ofer Lahav
• Clocks in the overlap of QM and GR - Ivette Fuentes
• Testing the non-classicality of gravity - Sougato Bose
• Dark matter - Chamkaur Ghag
• Low frequency scattered gravitational waves - Robert Flack
• DU and the Dirac equation – Petri Lievonen
• 3-spheres and de Sitter universe - Hamish Todd
• Spacetime as potential via Clifford algebras - Calum Robson
• The content of Planck’s constant - Tarja Kallio-Tamminen
• What have we learnt from De Broglie-Bohm trajectories? - Chris Dewdney
• The quantum potential as active information - Paavo Pylkkänen, with Ron Chrisley
• DeWitt on the quantum potential and the Hamiltonian operator – Lindon Neil

Background and context

The workshop honored the intellectual legacy of David Bohm (1917–1992) and Basil Hiley (1935–2024). Both physicists, who worked at Birkbeck College and later at UCL (Hiley), championed the importance of exploring novel and unorthodox perspectives in quantum theory in an open-minded way. Their work reminds us that scientific progress often thrives when we listen to divergent viewpoints in a spirit of dialogue, where a primary aim is first to understand what they mean, before moving on to a critical evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses.  This way we may hope to obtain a creative tension rather than a meaningless conflict between the viewpoints.