Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Chad Orzel Agnosticates MWI; Peter Woit ignores Bohm


In a sweeping statement that ignores David Bohm (pictured above) and is completely corrected by bohm(not) in the first reply here at Peter Woit's blog, Not Even Wrong, Woit makes the following sweeping statement:

He defends the failure of string theorists to come up with any experimental test after more than 25 years of work by thousands of physicists writing tens of thousands of papers with a comparison of the situation to that of the time lag between the 1935 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper and J.S. Bell’s work 29 years later.
... Peter Woit

That was taken completely out of context, apologies to Peter. The entire blog article is worth reading.

The point is that David Bohm and de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory are not chopped liver. John Stewart Bell said as much in a linked page in that reply, like so:

When I first realized that [Bohm’s theory is nonlocal], I asked: “Is that
inevitable or could somebody smarter than Bohm have done it differently
and avoided this nonlocality?” That is the problem that [Bell’s] theorem is
addressed to. The theorem says: “No! Even if you are smarter than Bohm,
you will not get rid of nonlocality,” that any sharp mathematical formulation
of what is going on will have that nonlocality....

In my opinion the picture which Bohm proposed then completely disposes
of all the arguments that you will find among the great founding fathers of
the subject—that in some way, quantum mechanics was a new departure of
human thought which necessitated the introduction of the observer, which
necessitated speculation about the role of consciousness, and so on.

All those are simply refuted by Bohm’s 1952 theory.... So I think that it
is somewhat scandalous that this theory is so largely ignored in textbooks
and is simply ignored by most physicists.

They don’t know about it.


... John Stewart Bell

Over at Chad Orzel's Uncertain Principles blog, there is an interesting view of a Scientist (Orzel) taking a moderate view for a change, on MWI.

It's nice to see that he links to Andrew Thomas' wonderful website on Quantum Mechanics early on.

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