[krastanov]

But it is not a tradeoff in the cases you picked, rather one set of formalisms has drastically more inconsistencies than the other. E.g. pilot waves: you gain having real numbers (which I personally see little value in) and you gain having a more mechanistic intuitive source of the interference (which is indeed interesting). However describing multiple interacting entangled particles becomes incredibly difficult, describing annihilation and second quantization which is needed for the quantum behavior of fields is not completely done yet, and (what I consider the most substantial problem) you can not work with finite level systems (i.e. anything but a spinless particle in a box is very difficult to describe by pilot wave theory).

In short, pilot waves were a worthwhile avenue of research, but we have seen they are incredibly cumbersome or even insufficient in many quantum mechanics problems.

[shpeedy]

Yep. Pilot Wave theory is underdeveloped theory, but it helps to develop intuition. Walking droplets are even better for that. IMHO, it's better to use QM to solve QM problems in science, but use walking droplets and Pilot Wave Theory to develop intuition for others. Walking droplets are easy to demonstrate. Double slit experiment can be reproduced in school lab. This way, quantum physics can be taught in school for children of age 12+, so they will be ready to solve much more complex problems when they will be PhD.

Entanglement is hard problem for PWT. Photos of entangled photons[0] are intriguing, because they look similar to behavior of walking droplets in some experiments (see dotwave.org feed). I hope, someone will be able to reproduce entanglement in macro. Currently, my top priority is to reproduce Stern–Gerlach experiment in macro (I suspect that interference between external field and particle wave creates channel, which guides particle into spot, but it better to see it once). Second priority is creation of "photons" in macro. Entanglement will be third. IMHO, all of them require microgravity to reproduce in 3D.

[0]: https://phys.org/news/2019-07-scientists-unveil-first-ever-i...

[krastanov]

With some caveats, I happily agree with the angle from this last comment! I agree PWT is a great way to get people hooked on quantum science, even if I consider it as a dead end for fixing the inconsistencies we have (semi-personal semi-professional opinion).