The "pilot wave." supplementary variables version of quantum mechanics diacusaed. It is claimed that in the many-object a semi-class picture of particles "guided" in their motion by waves m 3-spaces is difficult to maintain-Other interpretative schemes are suggested
Some two centuries before the quantum revolution, Newton (1) suggested that corpuscles of light generate waves in an aethereal medium like skipping stones generate waves in water, with their motion then being affected by these aether waves. Times have changed. Light corpuscles are now known as photons, and the majority of physicists have dispensed with the notion of aether. Nevertheless, certain features of Newton's metaphor live on in one particular version of quantum mechanics. According to pilot wave theory, first proposed by de Broglie (2) and later developed by Bohm (3) with Einstein's encouragement, microscopic elements such as photons and electrons consist of both particle and wave, the former being guided by the latter. Although this physical picture has not been widely accepted, it has had some notable proponents, including Bell (4). Its principal appeal is that it restores realism and determinism to quantum mechanics, its weakness that the physical nature of the guiding wave field remains unclear. At the time that pilot wave theory was developed and then overtaken by the Copenhagen interpretation as the standard view of quantum mechanics, there was no macroscopic pilot wave analog to draw upon. Now there is.
In [2], a detailed argument is presented on a version of pilot-waves, given by at Theory of Exclusively Local Beables. What the author of [2] considers to be his crucial proposal is described in the title of section 3 as 'complicated, ugly, and highly contrived'. The reason for such a proposal is claimed to be the widespread perception among quantum physicists, according to which 'those sympathetic to the pilot-wave ontology no doubt expected that, for a system of N particles moving in three spatial dimensions, the theoretical description would be of N wave-particle pairs - each pair consisting of a point particle guided in some way by an associated wave propagating in 3-space. But Schroedinger's wave function for such an N-particle system was emphatically not a set of N (interacting) waves, each propagating in 3-space. It was, rather, a single wave propagating in the 3N-dimensional configuration space for the system', [2, p. 5]. In the present paper it is argued that the mentioned widespread expectation need not be seen as being betrayed by what actually happens. In particular, the construction in section 3 of [2] may be avoidable.
More than sixty years after the general acceptance of Quantum Mechanics, and notwithstanding its enormous practical success, the nature of the fundamental objects appearing in its framework is unclear, and the debate concerning its conceptual foundations still goes on. This paper tries to examine what may be claimed to be one of the most ‘properly quantic’ ( Lévy-Leblond 1977 ) approaches to this problem, namely ‘no-collapse’ versions of the non-relativistic quantum mechanics of closed systems: Everett’s theory and the ‘pilot wave’.
The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of recent work on pilot-wave approaches to quantum field theory. In such approaches, systems are not only described by their wave function, as in standard quantum theory, but also by some additional variables. In the non-relativistic pilot-wave theory of deBroglie and Bohm those variables are particle positions. In the context of quantum field theory, there are two natural choices, namely particle positions and fields. The incorporation of those variables makes it possible to provide an objective description of nature in which rather ambiguous notions such as 'measurement' and 'observer' play no fundamental role. As such, the theory is free of the conceptual difficulties, such as the measurement problem, that plague standard quantum theory.
Abstract Objections to pilot-wave theory frequently come in three mutually-contradictory categories: that the theory is too bizarrely different from ordinary physics, that the theory is not radically different enough, and that the physics of pilot-wave theory is after all just the same as quantum physics. After a brief review of pilot-wave theory, we critically evaluate these objections. We show how the radical nature of pilot-wave theory is often misunderstood or overlooked. We highlight the novelty of its dynamics, and clarify its implications for our understanding of measurement, as well as discussing the status of Lorentz invariance, conservation laws, and the Born rule. We examine Einstein’s early work on pilot-wave theory and argue that he turned away from it for reasons which are no longer compelling. We urge that the theory be understood on its own terms, as a generalised nonequilibrium theory empirically distinct from quantum mechanics, with all its potentially revolutionary implications
Quantum theory and the de Broglie – Bohm pilot-wave theory are empirically equivalent. In addition to other objections to the pilot-wave theory, many physicists (and some philosophers) take this to be enough to dismiss the pilot-wave theory, as they say it adds nothing to the standard theory. In this short paper I review some objections and replies to the pilot-wave theory. In particular I respond to the empirical equivalence challenge arguing that, given their mutual relationship, there is no reason to expect the two theories to make different predictions, even if they actually might.