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vanesch said:Now, that's an interesting question![]()
He would have liked the "realist" aspect, and disliked the fact that relativity goes out of the window, I guess (but then, who am I to say what Einstein would have thought :shy: ...)
Actually, Einstein lived long enough to know about Bohm's theory. He famously remarked that it was "too cheap" and basically dismissed it. Vanesch is probably right that the main reason for this is that relativity goes out the window. It's also relevant that Einstein had more or less invented Bohm's theory himself about 40 years earlier, and had rejected it way back then precisely because it seemed to conflict with relativity. Einstein never got fully behind de Broglie's discovery of the same theory either, no doubt for about the same reason. And then, between the 20s (when de Broglie proposed this theory) and the 50s (when Bohm rediscovered it), Einstein had been working on his "unified field theory" idea, which was supposed to be some kind of massive replacement for QM which unified E&M and General Relativity and sort of "got underneath" the need for anything like the by-then-standard QM formalism. So I think that is basically what Einstein meant when he said Bohm's theory was "too cheap" -- it kept too much of the standard QM formalism, and just added something on top of it, something which *did not fix* what was for Einstein *the fundamental* problem with orthodox QM, namely the conflict with relativity. So while Einstein probably appreciated the conceptual clarity of Bohm's theory (relative to copenhagen) he didn't see Bohm as something that solved the fundamental problem, and simultaneously saw it as something that wasn't nearly radical enough in its break with orthodoxy. Hence, "too cheap".
However, unfortunately, Einstein did not live long enough to witness the next major development in this story, namely Bell's discovery (motivated by Bohm's theory, by the way... so much for the idea that Bohm's theory never led to any important new discoveries) that the non-locality (the anti-relativistic character) of Bohm's theory was *unavoidable* in any theory making (what we now know are) the empirically correct predictions for a certain class of experiments. So it wasn't, as Einstein thought, a matter of working to find a theory that would solve the fundamental problem with orthodox QM (its nonlocality), but rather of coming to grips with the fact that something is wrong or incomplete about relativity (or we've misunderstood it if we think it outlaws nonlocality). And once this is fully grasped (most still don't grasp it today), it removes completely the one otherwise-valid objection to Bohm's theory, namely that relativity goes out the window. If Einstein had lived long enough to see Bell's Theorem, he probably would have understood this and would have had a very very different reaction to Bohm's theory.
Sadly, though, that has to remain speculation.