Revisiting an Old Interpretation of QM

[jedishrfu]

I found this article recently on Wired.com and thought others might like to see it.

Basically its revisiting Bohmian Mechanics in the context of fluidics and how everyday objects can have quantum-like behavior explained via pilot waves:


Fluid Experiments Support Deterministic “Pilot-Wave” Quantum Theory

http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140624-fluid-tests-hint-at-concrete-quantum-reality/

 

[atyy]

This is basically a crackpot article that does a disservice to the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation. Tim Maudlin's post (June 25, 2014 at 2:43 pm) in the comments section are very close to my complaints about Wolchover's article.

If one wants to understand why the Bohmian interpretation is a technically correct possibility for solving the measurement problem in non-relativistic quantum mechanics, some good references are:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.3151
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0308039
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0308038

Here is a link to Couder and Fort's experimental report in PRL: https://hekla.ipgp.fr/IMG/pdf/Couder-Fort_PRL_2006.pdf

 

[Simon Bridge]

I don't think the experiments support the more far-reaching conclusions.
You cannot do physics by analogy.

 

[jedishrfu]

This is basically a crackpot article that does a disservice to the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation. Tim Maudlin's post (June 25, 2014 at 2:43 pm) in the comments section are very close to my complaints about Wolchover's article.

If one wants to understand why the Bohmian interpretation is a technically correct possibility for solving the measurement problem in non-relativistic quantum mechanics, some good references are:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.3151
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0308039
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0308038

Here is a link to Couder and Fort's experimental report in PRL: https://hekla.ipgp.fr/IMG/pdf/Couder-Fort_PRL_2006.pdf

So should we close the thread if its a crackpot article? The comment you mentioned seems to praise the article
for some parts while commenting on other parts:

Tim Maudlin says:
June 25, 2014 at 2:43 pm

Although I appreciate this article, I’m not sure that an average reader could quite understand the exact situation here. The pilot wave theory needs no help or support from experiments like these: it is a mathematically perfectly well-defined theory (in the non-Relativistic domain) that provably makes all the same predictions as the standard quantum formalism while also solving the measurement problem. What the oil-drop experiments provide is a tangible partial analog of the pilot-wave picture, but restricted to single-paricle phenomena (that is, this sort of experiment cannot reproduce the sort of phenomena that depend on entanglement). That is because only in the case of a single particle does the wave function have the same mathematical form (a scalar function over space) as do the waves in the oil. Once two particles are involved, the fact that the wave function is defined over the configuration space of the system rather than over physical space becomes crucial, and the (partial) analogy to the oil-drops fails.

It is, of course, very nice to bring attention to the pilot-wave approach, and these experiments can given one a sort of visceral sense of how it works in some (single particle) experiments. But if over-generalized, the picture can also be somewhat misleading.

To second the point about non-locality made above: yes, of course the pilot-wave theory is non-local. It had better be if it is to recover the predictions of quantum theory. That was what Bell proved. Einstein, of course, insisted on the obvious non-locality of the standard (Copenhagen) understanding of quantum theory: that is what the EPR paper was all about. Einstein hoped that a different approach could avoid the non-locality (“spooky-action-at-a-distance”) in the standard approach. Bell showed it can’t be done, so non-locality cannot be considered a defect of a theory. It is just the opposite: a local theory must be defective: it cannot make the right (experimentally verified) prediction of violation of Bell’s inequality for distant systems.

 

[jedishrfu]

I don't think the experiments support the more far-reaching conclusions.
You cannot do physics by analogy.

This is true and yet so much of human thought is done by analogy.