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by farrelle25 206 days ago
Another interpretation of the double-slit posits a guiding 'Pilot Wave' separate from physical particles... aka DeBroglie-Bohm Theory or Bohmian Mechanics.

Apparently it's not popular among professional physicsts though John Bell investigated it a bit. Einstein had some unpublished notes in the 1920s about a "Gespensterfeld" (ghost field) that guided particles.

Born was influenced by this 'Ghost field' idea when he published his famous interpretation of the 'Wave Function' |Ψ|^2 as a probability rather than a physical field.

More info: Nonlocal and local ghost fields in quantum correlations. https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9502017

2 comments

Veritasium did a video on this [1] with a surface of oil to replicate the effect on a petri dish.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIyTZDHuarQ

Pilot wave is still my favorite - I don’t really believe it, but I like the image
It is indeed a great way to translate classical intuitions to the quantum domain.