Oil droplets guided by pilot waves do not give rise to double-slit interference

You have red and black pebbles otherwise identical. Bag has 2 pebbles, you draw a pebble, it's red. You put it back. What's the probability of bag having black and red pebble? Draw again - red again. What's the probability of bag having black and red pebble? You acquire more data, therefore your estimate changes.

Don't be fooled by "local" in there; all non-locality results in 4D spacetime would remain true, because of course they have to. It would be "local" in an isomorphism that will be extraordinarily counterintuitive and probably never really be something anyone can "visualize".

But, if this did pan out, there would be a reasonable sense in which the Copenhagen interpretation would have something physics-al about it (as in, grounded in physics, not necessarily "physical" in the traditional sense), where it wasn't in fact "action at a distance". I for one have no problem with the universe creating probability distributions and then randomly picking a result, as some seem to. (The Universe May Do As It Damned Well Pleases. It's true that a good sense of aesthetics has given us a lot of power up to this point, but "I don't think that's very aesthetic" is not a very strong argument. I'll give it more than 0, but not much.)

Wait, what? From what I've always understood, the math behind de Broglie-Bohm interpretation results in the same exact results as the Copenhagen interpretation. It shouldn't be possible for any "computer simulation" to disprove it, by definition.

This article feels 1) pointless and 2) like it has an agenda. Oil droplets are a macro-scale approximation of something on the particle level where we already know the math works. This doesn't disprove anything, any more than doing experiments with rubber sheets and basketballs lets you disprove the general theory of relativity.

> crushing a century-old dream that there exists a single, concrete reality.

This is just sensationalist, cheap journalism. I expected far better from Quanta Magazine, and I'm disappointed in them. I've enjoyed many of their articles in the past, but I'm not sure I can trust them editorially any more if they print something so obviously incorrect as this article.

If true, one wonders if you could use this to build a d-wave like annealer.

The de Broglie-Bohm interpretation is not the same as the pilot-wave theory, which was never fully fleshed out. de Broglie-Bohm is valid and makes the same predictions as the standard interpretation, but as I understood it, has never been generalized to the relativistic versions of the standard theory. That is, there is no de Broglie-Bohm version of quantum field theory.

This is discussed in the article; the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation relies on a global pilot wave, which has non-locality issues that pilot wave theory hoped to avoid.

> It shouldn't be possible for any "computer simulation" to disprove it, by definition.

Here I believe they are disproving the idea that the oil droplets riding the pilot waves cannot result in the double-slit interference pattern, using standard fluid mechanics (which appears to be Tomas Bohr's area of expertise).