Tuesday, July 01, 2014

Fluid Experiments Support Deterministic “Pilot-Wave” Quantum Theory

Fluid Experiments Support Deterministic “Pilot-Wave” Quantum Theory describes how some recent fluid experiments have revived interest in an old alternative to Quantum Theory.

The idea that pilot waves might explain the peculiarities of particles dates back to the early days of quantum mechanics. The French physicist Louis de Broglie presented the earliest version of pilot-wave theory at the 1927 Solvay Conference in Brussels, a famous gathering of the founders of the field. As de Broglie explained that day to Bohr, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and two dozen other celebrated physicists, pilot-wave theory made all the same predictions as the probabilistic formulation of quantum mechanics (which wouldn’t be referred to as the “Copenhagen” interpretation until the 1950s), but without the ghostliness or mysterious collapse.

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