Standard Model of physics

[Descartz2000]

Is the Standard Model of physics more aligned with Bohm's or Bohr's interpretations? And if more aligned with Bohm, then why is the Copenhagen model so highly regarded and not Bohm's?

 

[mathman]

Opinion of a non expert. The standard model sort of exists without either interpretation. However many experts in the field agree that no one really understands quantum theory. Bohm and Bohr start out with the same theory, but their attempts at explanation differ.

 

[ExactlySolved]

There is no Bohmian account of most of the standard model, since there is no generally accepted relativistic Bohmian theory, and there is no generally accepted Bohmian field theory, there is only a Bohmian theory of non-relativistic QM particles.

Therefore aligning the standard model, along with the notion of particle/anti-particle creation, non-abelian gauge fields, and the Higgs mechanism, is not a foreseeable option using the Bohmian approach.

Personally I think it is wrong to encourage students of physics to study fringe theories like Bohmian mechanics, students who don't know any better, since it takes away time that they could use to learn mainstream physics. Really there is no Bohmian theory, just a single Bohmian spiel, and ideas like this or LQG get 10,000% more attention on PF than in any major research university. Sorry for the rant, I just find fringe science and the corresponding delusions of grandeur to be a truly sad phenomenon that young people get sucked into, in some cases worse than, and in fact highly correlated with, drugs.

 

[Ilja]

There is no Bohmian account of most of the standard model, since there is no generally accepted relativistic Bohmian theory, and there is no generally accepted Bohmian field theory, there is only a Bohmian theory of non-relativistic QM particles.

In principle, correct, because different people prefer different Bohmian versions in the domain of field theory. But it creates a wrong impression.

Therefore aligning the standard model, along with the notion of particle/anti-particle creation, non-abelian gauge fields, and the Higgs mechanism, is not a foreseeable option using the Bohmian approach.

That's wrong. Relativistic field theory for a simple scalar field (like Higgs) is not problematic at all. This includes the full beauty of relativity as well as particle-antiparticle creation.

Various versions exist for fermions (Bell, Colin, Valentini), as well as for the EM field (Struyve Westman). I don't believe that the BRST quantization scheme corresponds to something in reality, and therefore do not think that one should even try to construct a Bohmian variant of BRST quantization.

Another point is that to recover the empirical QFT predictions one does not even need a QFT version for all fields, having one only for fermions, or only for the EM field, is sufficient for this. A theory build in this way is not that beautiful, therefore it is clear that people disagree with such versions and try to find something better, but from the purely positivistic point of view there is no reason to object: Bells "fermions only" theory is empirically as good as QFT, even better: QFT is not a realistic theory, Bell's theory is realistic, but only not really beautiful.

Personally I think it is wrong to encourage students of physics to study fringe theories like Bohmian mechanics, students who don't know any better, since it takes away time that they could use to learn mainstream physics.

Personally I think that different interpretations should be teached. It is clearly an improvement if one recognizes what is a particular feature of a particular interpretation and what is supported by observational evidence. The easiest way to get this difference is to have different interpretations. Teaching them only shut up and calculate and often enough plainly wrong things, like the impossibility of a deterministic interpretation, is much worse.

Really there is no Bohmian theory, just a single Bohmian spiel, and ideas like this or LQG get 10,000% more attention on PF than in any major research university. Sorry for the rant, I just find fringe science and the corresponding delusions of grandeur to be a truly sad phenomenon that young people get sucked into, in some cases worse than, and in fact highly correlated with, drugs.

The Copenhagen interpretation, or, even worse, many worlds, much more remembers something created under the influence of drugs. With enough alcohol inside, one easily sees already two worlds.

 

[naturale]

It's very dangerous to mix drugs with physics and the effect in modern physics is evident. Sometimes it seems that physicists pretend that the nature must follow their hallucinations. The correct approach to physics is to learn with humility from nature, not pretend to be better than nature. Fortunately there is still a lot to learn from the nature of our world (without take into account other ones), like its cyclic behavior, as long as it is left unperturbed.
Recently has been proposed a new (and in my opinion revolutionary) approach to QM mechanics (see thread "quantization from periodic dynamics?") that starts from the de Broglie hypothesis of periodic waves (do you remember the Bohr Hydrogen atom or the old Bohr-Sommerfeld-Einstein interpretation of QM?) and leads to a beautiful and coherent interpretation of QFT and SR. After I read about this theory to me it is difficult to speak again in terms of wave function collapse, virtual particles, Schrodinger cats, MWI, BI, etc... but it seems that I am the only one to notice it.