I do too, i just find the concept considerably more elegant, and to my own feeble mind considerably more intuitive. The Pilot Wave theory has also been getting some experimental support recently [0], and while it's still fairly early, it still beats string theory. All the work in nonlocality also helps in my opinion the Pilot Wave theory to become relevant again, we have too many experimental data for use to disregard it and none of the other solutions that incorporate nonlocality seem as elegant to me. I too think that the universe is most likely deterministic, and has strong realism which saves us from having to deal with the observer concept in QM especially some of the weirder interpretations of it[1].

P.S. If anyone is interested in PWT one of the best materials I've seen is a series of lectures by Mike Towler of Cambridge University[2]. It's probably one of the better constructed lectures I've seen of QM in general, it hits the very rare sweet spot of being actually informative without falling into the realm of popular science while not requiring PHD level physics to follow (infact depending on the country you went to high school if you did cover QM in year 10-12 it's almost everything you need).

[0]https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160517-pilot-wave-theory-ga...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_int...

[2]http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/PWT/lectures/bohm1.pdf (change the url from bohm1 to bohm8 to get all the slides)

You should be careful with the language. Pilot Wave Theory gives rise to the quantum formalism. Anything predicted by standard quantum mechanics is a prediction of PWT.

Of course, the PWT viewpoint may suggest new ideas and understandings; it is, after all, what led Bell to his inequality and thus spawned all of the entanglement uses including quantum cryptography. But it gets reincorporated into standard quantum mechanics.

None of that really matters. People reject PWT because they want to reject it. There have never been any good reasons. It is an extremely simple theory that answers the questions.

If it gets accepted in the future, it will only be because of a new generation being more willing to embrace it.

At first the physicists said it was impossible and then when it was obvious that it was possible, they said it was too trivial. This is a hallmark of reason being used to justify an already decided on outcome.

It is also not in conflict with string theory. One could imagine string theory actually having strings that evolve. This would be the spirit of PWT applied to that realm.

I'm curious what language would that be? I didn't thought i made any strong statements.

Yes in it's essence PWT doesn't conflict with the concept of strings (nothing really does), I'm not so sure that I doesn't conflict with the leading "complete" string theories out there today.

"getting strong experimental support" makes it sound like it is experimentally distinguishable from standard quantum mechanics.

Can there ever be an experiment which proves which interpretation of QM is correct? I have heard that there isn't but I find that so weird. Don't they have any difference in their predictions at all?

GRW (spontaneous collapse of the wavefunction) is a different theory and theoretically experiments could get good enough to prove it wrong.

But most interpretations have the same statistical predictions as standard QM. The standard Copenhagen setup can be argued to not actually be a theory (the split between quantum and classical in a fundamental theory is an absurdity since the classical is made up of quantum ), but assuming that an interpretation is clear enough to be called a theory and has the same statistical framework as standard quantum mechanics, then experiments will not distinguish them.

The different interpretations, however, may lead to different insights for extending the theory. And in that game, one may pull ahead of the other. For example PWT inspired Bell's results. PWT can also explain the impact of the topology of configuration space convincingly since the configuration is a fundamental part of the theory. It leads to many insights that the others just have to assume.

GRW with a flash ontology has a relativistic version with no foliations. So that's cool.

Ah, i see now, well that wasn't my intention at all.

IMHO, PWT can be proved with two slits experiment and FTL electrons: they will behave like particles, because their wave will be unable to interfere with itself.

PS.

To clarify, if double slit will be put in a medium where speed of light is much slower, then there will be a speed, when electron with that speed will stop behaving like wave. This point will be depended on speed of electron, speed of light in medium, and distance between slits.

Is that even possible to construct? won't any dielectric media interfere with the wave/particle duality regardless if the speed of light is slower or faster than the speed of the electron in it?

Yep, it will be hard to conduct.

IMHO, it still possible to adjust slit experiment in such way, that slight increase in speed will break interference, i.e. at speed X electron will behave like wave, but at speed X+1 electron will behave like normal particle.

> I'd rather embrace nonlocality than the crazy many-worlds stuff.

Why do you describe many-worlds as 'crazy'?

Edit: to whoever down-voted me, this was a serious question.

What does it mean if particular probability for x vs y is an irrational number? Can you really have a number of universe forks counted in something that isn't integers?

If you don't really have independent universe forks but something physically continous, what mechanism makes us seem to only observe a single independent branch at all times?

Given the assumption of quantum foam (from the uncertainty principle) at the Planck length + relativity (the Planck length isn't constant like the speed of light, every observer measures it differently relative to others), how many universe branches are really created every picosecond in every Planck length (volume) across the visible universe?

IANA physicist, but my layman's understanding was that under many-worlds the universe doesn't actually fork. Rather, the superposition of states observed in things like the double-slit experiment applies to all particles all the time, including the ones in our brains. When we observe a system undergo an apparent collapse of the wave-function, what's actually happening is that we/our brains have become entangled with that system, so each of our brains' states becomes correlated to one of the system's states. To a consciousness generated by one of those brain states, it appears that the system under observation has undergone a collapse; however, the result of that collapse appears different to each such brain state.

At least, that's what I took away from this:

http://www.askamathematician.com/2010/10/q-copenhagen-or-man...

and this:

http://www.askamathematician.com/2011/11/q-according-to-the-...

Wow. At some point this theory just becomes so complex it will collapse like the wave functions it talks about...

Seriously, to my also-completely-laymen mind this seems adding epicycles to me.

Nonlocality means there may be interactions between particles across space. That seems reasonable because what we intuitively think of as space and time may just be strong correlations. Causality etc.

But if at every moment you literally have an infinite amount of worlds branching off, then that's vastly bigger than one world in which interactions can be nonlocal. It violates everything from Occam's Razor to practicality.

The question of why time is non reversible can be answered by saying that entropy of a system grows with time, which is a consequence of simple statistics. But with many-worlds you have branching in the forward time direction? Can you explain anything about it?

> if at every moment you literally have an infinite amount of worlds branching off

As I said in my reply to Natanael_L, I was given to understood that the idea of worlds branching off was a misapprehension of the many-worlds interpretation. But I'm prepared to be corrected.

> I personally think pilot-wave theory is about to make a serious comeback in this coming decade.

Which is a shame, because John Bell of Bell's theorem was already a fan back in the 60s. He correctly labelled non-locality as the fundamental problem of QM, where other interpretations just let them gloss over this difficulty by labeling such questions "non-physical".

But realistically, I think information-theoretic formalizations of QM will simply gain more popularity in rather than something like de Broglie-Bohm. There's simply too much anti-realism sentiment in the physics community for it to gain much traction.

Yeah that and pilot wave has some elegancy to it that finds simmetry at so many other scales. So in other words as long as them will all be interchangeable and unverified, I'll fanboi for pilot wave.