bohm2
Science Advisor
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Yes, and that's why Maudlin argued that once you involve multiple particles it won't deliver the goods:atyy said:The main thing is he is only talking about single particle theory, so ##v## and ##\psi## can be constant multiples of each other, but we can consider ##v## to be in physical space and ##\psi## to be in configuration space. There is no known generalization to multiple particles. In the known generalizations, both ##v## and ##\psi## have to be in configuration space to reproduce quantum mechanics. Both of us initially assumed that liquidspacetime was talking about the general multiple particle case, but it seems he is only talking about the single particle case.
In the single particle case, where configuration space is just three-dimensional space, there's no difficulty. But as far as I understand, there's no solution in a multiparticle system without bringing in configuration space? And then one is forced to treat the configuration space as "real".What the oil-drop experiments provide is a tangible partial analog of the pilot-wave picture, but restricted to single-particle 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...