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Notes
Beside quantum mechanics, I put general relativity theory in this category.
I have adapted this quote from p. 281 of the book, where Bricmont quotes John Clauser (his Ref. [97]) saying furthermore: “I was personally told as student that these men [Einstein, Schrödinger, de Broglie] had become senile, and that clearly their opinions could no longer be trusted in this regard. This gossip was repeated to me by a large number of well-known physicists from many different prestigious institutions. ... Under the stigma’s unspoken ‘rules,’ the worst sin that one might commit was to follow Einstein’s teaching and to search for an explanation of quantum mechanics in terms of hidden variables, as Bohm and de Broglie did.”
All references to page numbers refer to the book under review.
This comment is inspired by—in fact: copied from—a recent New York Times op-ed piece by the great economist Paul Krugman, where it was made in response to a different reality dismissal.
More accurately, non-quantum physics.
I have on occasion heard the criticism that the linearity of the unitary quantum evolution is not a distinctive feature of QM because Newtonian N-point mechanics is equivalent to the evolution by the linear Liouville equation, and therefore, like QM, “a linear theory.” However, such claims ignore that the equivalence only holds for the fundamental state, which is represented by a Dirac delta function concentrated on a single point in N-particle phase space—the linear superposition of two such Dirac delta functions is a state which is not supported at a single point and therefore not a legitimate fundamental state of Newtonian N-point mechanics.
Wightman put it thus: “Where do the facts come from?”
Essentially all quotations of John S. Bell in Bricmont’s book are from the collection of Bell’s works on the foundations of QM [1].
N.B.: By “determinism” Bell here refers to the hidden variables whose qualities EPR concluded must (pre-)determine the outcome of the experiments. This becomes clear through the context.
Bell’s frustration is shared by others: “I can’t take it anymore. Eventually [somebody] will win the Nobel Prize in physics for having shown that reality does not exist.” [7].
Einstein, to the best of the reviewers knowledge, didn’t elaborate what was “too cheap” about the “de Broglie–Bohm way” to quantum mechanics. Einstein did, however, write down some concrete criticism of the de Broglie–Bohm theory in his contribution to the Festschrift on the occasion of Max Born’s retirement from the Tait Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh (Hafner Pub. Co. Inc., N.Y., 1953), Ref. [172] in Bricmont’s book. Remarkably enough, after Bohm refuted Einstein’s criticism Einstein asked the editors that Bohm’s refutation be included also in the Festschrift—and so it was. Basically, Bohm’s argument was that Einstein had criticized the de Broglie–Bohm theory based on a particular solution which is not physically observable, similarly to criticizing Newtonian mechanics by pointing out that it allows (never observed) solutions showing a needle standing on its tip on a glass plate forever, without analyzing whether this is a stable (read: observable) situation.
I ignore here that Newton wrote he thought that there is a preferred “absolute space,” for his theory does not rely on this supposition.
Incidentally, if in the guiding equation one sets \(\hbar \Phi (t,\mathbf {x}) =: S(t,\mathbf {x})\), it becomes identical to the one in the Hamilton–Jacobi formulation of Newtonian point mechanics, except that \(S(t,\mathbf {x})\) here does not satisfy the Hamilton–Jacobi PDE, but rather a PDE which differs from it by an additive term which depends only on \(|\Psi |\). Since this \(|\Psi |\)-dependend term symbolically vanishes as \(\hbar \rightarrow 0\), one sees that Newtonian point particle mechanics is the classical limit of the de Broglie–Bohm theory whenever \(S(t,\mathbf {x})\) converges to a regular function as \(\hbar \rightarrow 0\). Hamilton–Jacobi theory is not addressed in Bricmont’s book, who tries to keep the mathematics at a more elementary level.
This means “the wave function is all there is.”
“For All Practical Purposes;” the acronym is due to John Stewart Bell.
Read: “without a clear statement of what exists.”
Standing, not for “Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule” but, for “Events, Trees, Histories.”
Full disclosure: The reviewer is on record [14] for expressing the opinion that “the de Broglie–Bohm theory (a.k.a. Bohmian mechanics), which is presumably the simplest theory which explains the orthodox quantum mechanics formalism, has reached an exemplary state of conceptual clarity and mathematical integrity. No other theory of quantum mechanics comes even close.”
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Kiessling, M.KH. Book Review of Jean Bricmont’s “Making Sense of Quantum Mechanics”. J Stat Phys 169, 685–695 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10955-017-1881-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10955-017-1881-0