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Re:Why don't more physicists subscribe to pilot wave theory? by tim333 on Saturday December 17, 2016 @06:47AM (#13200327)
Apart from for experiments. The basic idea is your experiment does odd quantum stuff until your equipment detects something whereupon you get a definite result so it's a simple way of thinking about that. Hence probably its origin and ongoing popularity.
Re:Why don't more physicists subscribe to pilot wave theory? by loup-vaillant on Saturday December 17, 2016 @09:56AM (#13200914)
> Apart from for experiments.

Who cares? Experiments are a tie: those different interpretations all make the same observable claims.

From there, which is best depends on what you care about most: is the first interpretation we came up with best, because "science"? Is the simplest interpretation best, because "Bayes"? Do stuff like locality, determinism etc. matter?

Me I side with Bayes, and that means Many Worlds/decoherence, which is simplest. Others would make another choice.

Re:Why don't more physicists subscribe to pilot wave theory? by naasking on Saturday December 17, 2016 @10:11AM (#13200965)
> The basic idea is your experiment does odd quantum stuff until your equipment detects something whereupon you get a definite result so it's a simple way of thinking about that.

You're probably thinking of "instrumentalism" aka "shut up and calculate". Copenhagen is not instrumentalism.

Re:Why don't more physicists subscribe to pilot wave theory? by thomasahle on Saturday December 17, 2016 @07:24AM (#13200454)
The Copenhagen interpretation also seems most in line with how we think of Quantum computing?: You manipulate the complex wave forms (interference), and at some point you make it collapse (experiment) and get results with the predicted probabilities.
Re:Why don't more physicists subscribe to pilot wave theory? by naasking on Saturday December 17, 2016 @10:37AM (#13201045)
Every interpretation of QM has its own story for quantum computing. However, other interpretations have a challenge: where does quantum speedup come from?

Copenhagen can't actually explain where the quantum speedup actually comes from.

Other interpretations try to explain it, but are similarly problematic. For instance, in many worlds, Everett tried to argue that pieces of the computation are shuffled off to other worlds and then brought back, but this is problematic because information isn't supposed to be shared with other worlds, and since other worlds also shuffle off an equal amount of computation to those worlds, how is overall speedup achieved exactly?

In pilot wave theories, quantum computing has a simple story: because the world is deterministic, the entire history of time leading up to your computation was predetermined and part of the computation. "Programming" a quantum computer simply creates the conditions where you can read out the answer.

The apparent quantum speedup is actually part of an illusion that we and our equipment are separate from the rest of the universe, but quantum computation is really a classical computation that had lots of time and plenty of resources (all particles in the universe) to run.