Dear Max,
don’t expect too much. There will be nothing for teleportation, computation, no-cloning etc except a blanket “nostrification”, i.e., the claim that if QM can do it so can BM (because, allegedly, BM==>QM). But the analysis of trajectories will add nothing at all to the understanding of these structures, because, to begin with, it is all in variables which are not position, so not on the radar of the theory (except by reading the position of some pointer at the very end).
In fact, do not expect anything for arrival times or even the double slit either. Why do find people the double slit paradoxical? Because they wonder how it can make a difference to a particle going through slit A whether or not slit B is open. The Bohmian answer here is exactly the “shut up and calculate” answer: You just have a different boundary condition, so you have to recompute the wave function, stupid. (Only in the Bohmian case you should compute a bit more fore the guiding eq.) Basically, you are merely told “this is just a manifestation of quantum non-locality”. Drawing a bunch of trajectories on top of the wave functions adds nothing you could call an “explanation” for anyone who found the slits paradoxical in the first place.
About arrival times, Roderich seems to think that this is a good project. It is not, because there are two very distinct issues. One is the first hitting time of the Bohmian or Nelsonian position process. Whatever you will find is not quadratic in the wave function, so (as Bohmians are fully aware) will NOT be what you read on your measuring device. So if Roderich is interested in “studying the probability distribution of the time at which a detector clicks” (as opposed to “the time at which a Bohmian particle hits a surface”) his best option is to scrap the Bohmian approach and do some honest QM. I worked on that in the 80s, and I can tell you that there are several ways of doing that, in varying degree of detail, even though most of the standard textbooks do not cover this.
Best, Reinhard
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.