The Bohm Interpretation

[bascule]

Hopefully I can prevent this from coming out as an assorted mishmash of completely non-technical gibberish. I realize it's inherently foolish to attempt to explore physics from a purely conceptual perspective, but, well, I continue to do so anyway...

 

This question began plaguing me particularly after I started looking deeper into the nature of quantum indeterminacy, namely discovering that the many-worlds hypothesis had grown so unfavorable and that experimental data testing Bell's inequality show that local hidden variables cannot explain quantum indeterminacy.

 

It's around then that I discovered the Bohm interpretation, which, as far as I can tell, posits a non-local superstructure to the entire universe.

 

Now, I have no doubt in my mind that even if the above description is remotely correct, that means something entirely different to me than it does to you.

 

What does it mean to me? Well, I tried to describe such a superstructure as best I could envision it. In my description, I described the universe as a graph of state holders which share an n:n mapping. The goal of this description was for space/locality to be an emergent effect of information flowing through this system, but just how such a system would self-organize into an apparent 3-dimensional spatial system (since the graph itself would evolve with time) is completely beyond me.

 

The Bohm interpretation, as I understand it, provides for a wave-driven, deterministic superstructure with a sort of universal wavefunction, and, if I understand it correctly, the the specific nature of the collapse of the wavefunction is non-locally connected to the state of the entire universe, or something to that effect.

 

Does anyone know who can help me out here? Do I understand the basics, or am I just completely confused?

[pablo d]

I assume you're already conversant on the subject but from my limited understanding I believe that the transactional interpretation comes to some of the same conclusions as Bohm's interpretation, all without directly positing non-locality - I like it as an interpretation because I abhor both the many-worlds interpretation and non-locality (except as a hypothetical means to an end, but how satisfying is that eh?)

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation

http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/tiqm/TI_toc.html

 

It requires a little mental gymnastics to understand what it means for wavefunction collapse, but that might just be me, I don't have the capacity to articulate it in a coherent manner sorry, but just thought I'd post the links to you just in case you're interested