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Rating: Summary: excellent Review: An excellent book that covers the hidden variables (which are actually the measured variables)interpertation as advanced by deBroglie and Bohm. This book carries this furthur and completes the theory in an understandable manner. It helps the reader to accept the possiblity of a field in 3N dimensional space. Once this is done things fall into place. It covers the main topics such as EPR, the measurement problem, and shows how the shifting boundary between the quantum world and the macro world vanishes.It is written for physicists, but I was able to muddle through the math with a fairly limited background. The verbage is excellent and so can be read by philosophers without missing the main points. A "lay" edition would be most welcome.
Rating: Summary: excellent Review: An excellent book that covers the hidden variables (which are actually the measured variables)interpertation as advanced by deBroglie and Bohm. This book carries this furthur and completes the theory in an understandable manner. It helps the reader to accept the possiblity of a field in 3N dimensional space. Once this is done things fall into place. It covers the main topics such as EPR, the measurement problem, and shows how the shifting boundary between the quantum world and the macro world vanishes. It is written for physicists, but I was able to muddle through the math with a fairly limited background. The verbage is excellent and so can be read by philosophers without missing the main points. A "lay" edition would be most welcome.
Rating: Summary: best on pilot wave to date Review: I prefer this one to Bohm's _Undivided Universe_. The exposition is clearer, and it does well without any super-speculative, cloudy ending. The virtue of the de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave is unmistakable here: real stat-mech type probabilities (which many-worlds can't get) emerging without any special postulate for the universe going on strike when a "measurement" occurs (which Copenhagen can't get rid of). Other good stuff here too; e.g., take your pick: Bohmize the Pauli equation, the Dirac equation, or an alternative treatment of spin coming from a quantum potential for the rigid rotator.
Rating: Summary: A good starting point Review: This book can serve as a good primer on the theory. It has many strong points and a few weaknesses. It's very good at explaining the postulates and assumptions that are the basis of the theory and comparing them with the traditional approach, without to much fuss with philosophy. It has several chapters with examples worked out in detail that I found really illuminating: even if the theory is ultimately found to be wrong, these examples will give the feeling to really visualise many quantum phenomena and to be able to deeply understand them, something which was much more difficult in the traditional approach. This is real fun for a physicist who has been using traditional quantum mechanics for years and remembers his early frustrations with the formalism. It convinced me that any course on quantum mechanics should include a short description of Bohm-de Broglie with a couple of examples. Among the weaknesses, it seems to me that the maths used to derive the quantum statistics in chapter 3 contains several errors. Also, the relativistic version of the theory is a bit sketchy, although in my opinion this theory demands a much deeper investigation in the relativistic context. This weakness may be inherent to de Broglie-Bohm theory and is already present in Bohm's and de Broglie's works. I think there is a tendency in the research in this field since de Broglie, which this book inherits partially: spend too much energy to convince of the validity of the theory, instead of using it to derive useful results. But forget the weaknesses and enjoy the chapters with QM examples.
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