Another Jonah Goldberg moment-- can anybody recommend a reasonably neutral discussion of Bohm's non-local hidden variable version of quantum theory? A little Googling turns up this encyclopedia article and a tutorial dialogue on the arxiv, but I'd like to see a fairly complete treatment of it that doesn't go to great lengths to make proponents of other interpretations sound like clueless goobers who are just too dim to perceive the obvious correctness of the Bohmian approach.
This isn't critical by any means-- the hour and a half I've just spent reading these pieces is really more cat-vacuuming than anything else, as I got the information I needed for the passing mention of Bohmian mechanics in Chapter 7 from the first few pages of the first reference I looked at. It's just that everything I can find easily reeks of True Believer, and that always irritates me.
- Log in to post comments
If you're willing to go to the other extreme, it's number eleven on Streater's list of lost causes in physics.
I suppose that if I provided equal numbers of quotes from Streater and the Stanford Encyclopedia thing, that would count as balanced and objective, by journalistic standards...
Does your criticism extend to all the references in this link ? What do you think of the PhD thesis of Struyve for example ?
About 15 years ago I read an essay of John Bell's on this subject that seemed quite sensible, like the rest of Bell's writing. I'm afraid I don't recall the reference. Bohm's original articles are themselves pretty good. All this is out of the dim, dark past, of course; I've no idea what I'd think if I read them today.
Scott Aaronson has a not-overtly-positive but very very short writeup of it here. Not sure if it's what you're looking for.
Part of the reason why it's difficult to find any such writings is that proponents of BM have to be continually on the defensive. You have to remember that a large proportion of physicists actually believe that John Bell's arguments have conclusively ruled out hidden variable theories, despite the fact Bell did not believe this himself and that BM offers a glaring counterexample.
Anyway, I second the recommendation of John Bell's papers. In fact, if you are hoping to do justice to realist interpretations of quantum theory then you should probably just read "Speakable and Unspeakable" from cover to cover. Then sit down and think about why the many versions of the Bell inequality argument given in that volume aren't all saying the same thing, despite initial appearances.
Also, you might want to try Albert's "Quantum Mechanics and Experience". He's more of an Everettian, but he gives Bohmian Mechanics a fair hearing and does point out some of its more bizarre consequences.
Here's a Usenet post by Urs Schreiber with some interesting comments.
There's some work out there in computational chemistry in "quantum hydrodyamics", i.e. trying to use the analogies to fluid dynamics to simplify solutions of the time-dependent Schrodinger equation. There's a book out there by Wyatt with that in the title that you might find interesting.
In a quick scan, I didn't see any references in the above to the density matrix version of Bohmian mechanics. I think that density matrices are a more elegant foundation for QM, and I was cheered to see their being given a Bohmian interpretation.
One of the more interesting facets of this is that it is possible to define quantum mechanics without a Hilbert space. A 2001 paper by Hiley (the collaborator of Bohm) goes into how this is done with density operators.
The book by Bohm and Hiley, "The Undivided Universe" gives a fairly thorough but very quick reading introduction to the older Bohmian mechanics theory.
http://k2.chem.uh.edu/ThesisArchive/Maddox.pdf (and references within).
This work is related to the Wyatt stuff mentioned in #8.