A reader points me to physics/0702069: “Would Bohr be born if Bohm were born before Born?” by H. Nikolic. My head hurts just reading that title.
O brave new quantum world!
O brave new quantum world!
A reader points me to physics/0702069: “Would Bohr be born if Bohm were born before Born?” by H. Nikolic. My head hurts just reading that title.
The only interesting thing about this paper is that the entire premise is false. In fact, de Broglie was the only person to present something that could be regarded as a complete theory of nonrelativistic Quantum Mechanics at the 7th Solvay conference, and it was precisely the same theory as Bohm’s. Although most people think that de Broglie only presented a single-particle theory, this is actually false. The confusion arises because de Broglie recognised that a relativistic theory was required, and he placed greater emphasis on a sketchy single-particle relativistic theory, giving the nonrelativistic one almost as a throwaway comment.
Although Born had already presented his statistical postulate, it was not yet integrated fully into Schroedinger wave mechanics and the matrix mechanics people were still very confused about non-stationary states. So, Bohmian mechanics (if not Bohm) was born before standard QM, and people still didn’t choose to adopt it.
For the full story see http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0609184.
Mostly off-topic, but perhaps worth a mention:
Experimental Realization of Wheeler’s Delayed-Choice Gedanken Experiment
Vincent Jacques, E Wu, Frédéric Grosshans, François Treussart, Philippe Grangier, Alain Aspect, Jean-François Roch
Science 16 February 2007:
Vol. 315. no. 5814, pp. 966 – 968
DOI: 10.1126/science.1136303
quant-ph/0610241