To put this into proper perspective, I quote what ever-perceptive Tim Maudlin says in the Comments For This Entry: 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.
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 22:41:40 +0000
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