Why don't more physicists subscribe to pilot wave theory?

Re:Why don't more physicists subscribe to pilot wave theory? by contravariant on Friday December 16, 2016 @09:53PM (#13198903)

I would have though the fact that the pilot wave theory uses the (multi-particle) Schroedinger equation, while most modern physics is based on field theory, would be more important. So far I've seen no formulation of the pilot wave theory in a way that incorporates fields, or provides some other mechanism to account for things like the annihilation of particles.

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Re:Why don't more physicists subscribe to pilot wave theory? by dnautics on Friday December 16, 2016 @10:08PM (#13198957)

If I'm not mistaken, It's just formalism. Mathematically a continuous wave function is equivalent to a countably infinite vector space.

It can be hard to switch between the two (as a chemist we are taught Schroeder and I have a hard time wrapping my head around Heisenberg)

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Re:Why don't more physicists subscribe to pilot wave theory? by chestervonwinch on Saturday December 17, 2016 @08:58AM (#13200722)

> a continuous wave function is equivalent to a countably infinite vector space

I think you mean that the function is a point in the vector space. More precisely, it is a point in a particular separable Hilbert space, i.e., a complete vector space equipped with an inner product that has countable, dense basis.

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Re:Why don't more physicists subscribe to pilot wave theory? by dnautics on Sunday December 18, 2016 @12:58AM (#13204573)

right, sorry. The space of continuous wave functions are equivalent to a countably infinite vector space.

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Re:Why don't more physicists subscribe to pilot wave theory? by jostylr on Saturday December 17, 2016 @09:13AM (#13200765)

There are various versions, but the one I recommend to date loses determinism (that was never the point) and allows for annihilation and creation of particles: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0208072

In addition, the ideas of Bohmian mechanics has led to a new direction in dealing with the divergences in QFT, that is, in finding a version of it that is mathematically well-defined: https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.00497

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Re:Why don't more physicists subscribe to pilot wave theory? by naasking on Saturday December 17, 2016 @01:07AM (#13199530)

There are plenty of field theory extensions for Bohmian mechanics. Due the relatively few people working on it, no single approach has become dominant.

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