Reply To: Why Bohmian theory?

#2915
Aurelien Drezet
Participant

Dear Robert Griffiths,
I am sorry I could not find the time to answer to your late remarks during the forum ( the temperature in Grenoble France was then reaching 40 ° Celsius and it was difficult for me to focus on science).
I would be very pleased however to try something in order ‘ to take up the cudgels” as you propose.
For me the main issue regarding your consistent history interpretation concerns the meaning of the paths defined using the ‘Wigner formula’ for correlations when there is no observation made (i.e. when discussing about the meaning of a path in an interferometer without path detector). For example, some authors like Y. Aharonov or D. Miller are not afraid to use retrodictively QM between measurements but what about the consistent history interpretation? Are you only considering actual experiments like in Bohr’s approach? If yes what is the difference with copenhagen? Also the consistency condition on the sum on histories (sum on non diagonal term=0) plays a fundamental role in your approach. Why is that since only one history will be actualized any way? If you give some value to all other histories which didn’t happen (but could have) using a consistency condition are you somehow making a new ontological axiom concerning what is allowed to be or not to be?

Any way I will read again your comments and papers in order to clarify those points.
On the same footing Basil Hiley in his book with Bohm discussed already the consistency interpretation and Sheldon Goldstein also commented it in his phys today paper. Do you think they missed the points concerning your theory?
It would be very interesting to have a discussion with you on these topics in order to compare those two interpretations.

PS: concerning surrealistic paths I wrote few papers on this subject which clarify (at least for my Bohmian eyes) some aspects of the problem

With best wishes

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