Does Bohmian Mechanics Offer a True Alternative to Quantum Mechanics?

[eljose79]

in fact i think bell,s theorem says no, but i do not know if there are another thing that would allow it to be true..is bohmian mechanics true?...if not why people continues working on it...?

 

[selfAdjoint]

Bell's conjecture, and the experiments beginning with Aspect's that confirmed it, ruled out a broad class of hidden variable theories, but not Bohm's. I believe I am correct to say that all the attempts to refute Bohm have been successfully countered by Bohm partisans. I personally do not think Bohm's theory is true but there are a few, a very few, genuine physicists who do.

 

[jeff]

Originally posted by selfAdjoint
Bell's conjecture, and the experiments beginning with Aspect's that confirmed it, ruled out a broad class of hidden variable theories, but not Bohm's.

Bohmian QM isn't actually a hidden variables theory. In particular, particles have well-defined position and momentum, but are profoundly effected by a "pilot wave" that always accompanies them.

In fact the predictions of BQM agree with those of ordinary QM in it's domain of applicability. In this sense, BQM is just a reformulation of QM and it's an accident of history that QM wasn't first advanced in this "debrogliesque" form. From this point of view, it shouldn't surprise that whatever claims made by supporters of BQM to ontological superiority over the conventional formulation, BQM offers nothing more than a quid pro quo. For example, the pilot wave is governed by a sourceless differential equation. So - ontologically speaking - where does the pilot wave come from, god?

Historically, the main reason for the lack of interest in BQM is that although it can be lorentz-invariantly extended to the relativistic domain, there's are no spacetime covariant way to do so because it relies on a canonical formulation which requires the selection of a distinguished time variable.