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To: Physicist
"My problem with it is that it posits a new process--the pilot wave--that isn't mathematically necessary to explain the observed data."

(I had to go double check my recollections on this!) It's not at all a new process. DeBroglie proposed it as early as 1925, but abandoned it, ironically enough, precisely because Bohr pointed out to him that it's non-local.

Correct me if I'm missing something, but the fundamental difference between Bohm's (pilot wave) and Bohr's (standard) interpretation is Bohm's claims that a particle exists between the time it's created and the time it's observed and Bohr's claims that it doesn't. Which one strikes you as requiring more black magic?

30 posted on 01/10/2002 12:39:51 PM PST by OBAFGKM
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To: OBAFGKM
Bohm's claims that a particle exists between the time it's created and the time it's observed and Bohr's claims that it doesn't.

I think that's a mischaracterization of the Copenhagen Interpretation. It would be more correct to say that (according to the CI) a particle's properties don't exist before they're measured.

Which one strikes you as requiring more black magic?

Neither. The nonlocality itself is the black magic, in my mind. There's a retroactivity about it, if you will, and that's what leads to all the counterintuitive shenanigans of objects at the quantum scale.

39 posted on 01/10/2002 1:22:00 PM PST by Physicist
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