Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics

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Since this is more philosophy than science I thought I'd post this here. Is there anybody who feels sympathetic to this interpretation? What are your major reasons for favouring this interpretation? What physical meaning do the empty waves have?

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/

Bohm's interpretation crashes head on with Special Relativity.

Its predictions are identical to the non-Relativist Copenhagen based theory. In short, there is no gain by using it and a loss in that it cannot be generalized to quantum field theory which must be consistent with Special Relativity.

ruveyn

There are some attempts at finding a Lorentz invariant extension of Bohmian mechanics. Like here:

http://www.maphy.uni-tuebingen.de/membe ... iverse.pdf

An overview of some of these problems is discussed in this set of graduate course slides on De Broglie-Bohm model:

http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/pilot_waves.html

I thought that the Everett many worlds theory of quantum mechanics was the fad.

I don't know how valid this is but this recent paper suggests compatibility between Bohmian mechanics and Special relativity:

"In addition, it is sometimes objected that the Bohmian interpretation is nonlocal, but this is not really a valid argument against this particular interpretation because any theory (compatible with QM) that assumes that single reality exists even without measurements must necessarily be nonlocal [22]. Finally, due to nonlocality, it is frequently objected that this interpretation is not consistent with relativity. Nevertheless, various partial steps towards a relativistic-covariant formulation of the Bohmian interpretation of many-particle systems have been done in [23] and [20]...To conclude, all this shows that the Bohmian interpretation is well motivated, relativistic covariant, and compatible with the relativistic invariant probabilistic interpretation (13)."

http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/ ... 1905v2.pdf

Also I've come across papers, including Bohm's papers, suggesting that the de Broglie-Bohm theory makes concrete predictions that in extreme circumstances are different to those of orthodox QM, and so it can in principle be tested. Here's an interesting and comprehensive paper on some of the virtues of Bohmian interpretation:

Why isn’t every physicist a Bohmian?

http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/quant-ph/p ... 2119v2.pdf

Bohm-DeBroigle contradicts Special Relativity which is extremely well supported by evidence.

Do you know of a specific experiment whose outcome is predicted by Bohm-Debroigle (correctly ) and is incorrectly predicted by standard quantum theory ?

If so can you post a reference to it. Thanx.

ruveyn

Violation of Bell's inequality shows that the *world* is non-local. It's no criticism of de Broglie-Bohm that it displays this feature of the world in an obvious way.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-action-distance/