[chanon]

With all this writing about the 'quantum problem' and quantum mechanics not making sense, I don't understand why quantum theorists don't take pilot wave theory and the oil droplet experiments more seriously.

http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-new-quantum-reality/

Also, having people with expertise in other fields (fluid dynamics in this case) look at the problem is exactly what can create progress.

[orbifold]

It's because the problems mentioned in the article are primarily philosophical in nature and not things most physicists, even quantum physicists, spend actual time researching. For example anything related to the many world interpretation or more generally the measurement problem, would make for a terrible thesis topic, it also probably wouldn't get any funding (Pilot wave theory in particular is explicitly excluded from receiving funding from the NSF, see http://www.mth.kcl.ac.uk/~streater/lostcauses.html). So the only people working on such things are professors well into their tenure and even they will more likely write about such topics during the family summer vacation.

[jostylr]

My thesis advisor does get NSF funding and he does Bohmian mechanics. I have a very talented colleague doing this as well and he ended up with tenure recently. But it is a very hard road.

I did a thesis on it which I am quite proud of. But I also left academia proper though more due to my disgust with various aspects of the system unrelated to the discrimination associated with Bohmian mechanics.

To be fair to your point, the successful ones pursuing this either hide out in mathematics departments or keep their mouth shut until well-established.

[tmvphil]

I can't speak for other quantum theorists, but pilot wave theory does nothing to make multi-particle entanglement less mysterious. It provides a nice story for wave-particle duality, but for a long time it has been apparent that this is not the central mystery of quantum mechanics.

[jostylr]

It does focus the discussion clearly on the wave function as defined on configuration space, bringing to the front the importance of position.

But mostly the reason is that if you are going to develop a better theory (namely how relativity and qm work together), then it may be helpful to start on a clear foundation where irrelevant confusions have been eliminated.

For example, the role of operators is derived in pilot wave theory, not assumed. This greatly simplifies the issues of putting quantum mechanics on curved space where the Fourier transform may not be so easily defined, if at all. You do have to worry about the Hamiltonian and its boundary conditions, which is part of the physics of the space, but the relevant measurement operators are derivable from the ported theory.

[GraffitiTim]

I believe the Aeon article is referring to pilot wave theory when it talks about Broglie-Bohm, although it does so with almost no explanation, even though it's one of the main threads of the article.

I think the idea of pilot wave theory is really interesting, and that a variant of it could turn out to be more fundamental than our current understanding of quantum physics.

[ilitirit]

> I don't understand why quantum theorists don't take pilot wave theory and the oil droplet experiments more seriously.

One of the reasons is that it's considered to be an "Aether Theory".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories#Pilot_waves

[cygx]

I don't understand why quantum theorists don't take pilot wave theory and the oil droplet experiments more seriously.

This goes back to Einstein, whose main beef with QM actually wasn't indeterminism. Instead, determinism was supposed to be a means to restore locality. Bell's theorem tells us this is doomed to fail, and indeed Bohmian mechanics restores determinism only at the cost of locality.

Even though experiments with walking droplets are an impressive demonstration that wave-particle duality isn't necessarily something mysterious, they don't help to address the issues at the heart QM.