Jim Baggott, John L. Heilbron
Abstract The old guard reacted predictably to Bohm’s theory, but were obliged to concede its logical consistency. Oppenheimer denounced it as ‘juvenile deviationism’. With the help of his communist assistant, Jean-Pierre Vigier, de Broglie re-embraced the pilot wave theory he had abandoned in 1927. Pauli claimed that de Broglie had relapsed to his ‘shadow physics beer-idea wish dreams’ under Bohm’s ‘devilish influence’. The old guard rallied in the face of this French recidivism. Bohm and Vigier argued that the wave field could be modelled as a fluid and a particle as an inhomogeneity in the fluid, subject to many small random fluctuations. Owing to these vicissitudes, any arbitrary statistical distribution of inhomogeneities will tend towards the value dictated by the Born rule. Few were persuaded. The squabbling between Einstein and Born continued as the old guard began to fall, and as Bohm left Brazil first for Israel, and then England.
•Apr 25, 2024•0 citations