Visitors n. , from: 14.02.2015

Copyright (C) 2015, www.wave-mechanics.eu

As is told in excellent books such as Refs.[1-3], the emerging Wave Mechanics, which was developing, between 1923 and 1927, under the impulse of its founding fathers L. de Broglie and E. Schrödinger [4-8], was overwhelmed by a group of influential physicist such as N. Bohr, W. Heisenberg, W. Pauli, M. Born and P. A. M. Dirac, who passed it off as a synonym, or even as a minor particular case, of their pre-existent Quantum Mechanics.
This coup d'état - whose main result was the (nowadays persistent) hegemony of the probabilistic Copenhagen interpretation (overthrowing de Broglie's and Schrödinger's causal and realistic point of view), took basically place at the 5th Solvay International Conference, in 1927. The most distinguished victim of this hegemony was de Broglie himself, who felt forced to withdraw his own point of view and to align with the official one for over two decades. Schrödinger, for his part, firmly dissociated from the official point of view for the rest of his career [9].
A small breach was open in 1952 by Bohm [10-11], who re-discovered an approach similar to the one of de Broglie, and by de Broglie himself, who took the opportunity to go back [12-15] to his own ancient causal and realistic ideas [6], but wasn't able to make himself heard beyond a small circle of followers. Bohm's work, in its turn, was carried on and kept alive in Refs.[16-19], but remained almost ignored for many years, and began to bear fruit in chemical physics and nanoscale systems just before the beginning of the present century, raising a widening trend [20-24].
Both Bohm and de Broglie, however, had been affected, more or less consciously and to different extents, by the probabilistic Copenhagen hegemony - and it's on this point that we began, a few years ago, to express our opinion [25-28], proposing an interpretation of Wave Mechanics based on a novel and general mathematical property holding for any kind of monochromatic waves.
The most direct and important consequences of this property are provided (because of its Helmholtz-like character) by the time-independent Schrödinger equation, allowing a description in term of exact, non-statistical, classical-looking, point-like particle trajectories, ruling out the Copenhagen claim of an intrinsically probabilistic character of Nature.
The time-dependent Schrödinger equation, which is a consequence of the time-independent one (while the reverse is generally claimed), lends itself, in turn, to a statistical description, visually described by Bohm's probability flux lines.
A statistical description which, before the breakthrough allowed by our approach, was the only one the Copenhagians and Bohmians had available.

Milan, February 2015

References

1. L. de Broglie/G. Lochak, Un itinéraire scientifique (Ed. La Découverte, Paris, 1987)
2. J. T. Cushing, Quantum Mechanics: Historical Contingency and the Copenhagen Hegemony (The University of Chicago Press, 1994)
3. G. Bacciagaluppi and A.Valentini, Quantum Theory at the Crossroad. Reconsidering the 1927 Solvay Conference (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
4. L. de Broglie, Compt. Rend. Acad. Sci. 177, pg. 517, 548 and 630 (1923)
5. L. de Broglie, Annales de Physique 3, 22 (1925) (Doctoral Thesis of 1924)
6. L. de Broglie, Jour. de Phys. et le Rad. 8, 225 (1927)
7. E. Schrödinger, Annalen der Physik 79, pg. 361 and 489 (1926)
8. E. Schrödinger, Annalen der Physik 81, 109 (1926)
9. E. Schrödinger, The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Ox Bow Press (1995)
10. D. J. Bohm, Phys. Rev. 85, 166 (1952)
11. D. J. Bohm, Phys. Rev. 85, 180 (1952)
12. L. de Broglie, La Physique Quantique restera-t-elle indéterministe? (Gauthier-Villars, 1953)
13. L. de Broglie, Une tentative d'interprétation causale et non-linéaire de la Mécanique Ondulatoire (Gauthier-Villars, 1956)
14. L. de Broglie, la Théorie de la Mesure en Mécanique Ondulatoire (Gauthier-Villars, 1957)
15. L. de Broglie, L'interprétation de la Mécanique Ondulatoire par la Théorie de la Double Solution (Proc. Intern. School of Physics "E. Fermi", Course XLIX ,Varenna, 1970)
16. D. J. Bohm and B. J. Hiley, Found. Phys. 5, 93 (1975)
17. D. J. Bohm and B. J. Hiley, Found. Phys. 12, 1001 (1982)
18. D. J. Bohm and B. J. Hiley, Found. Phys. 14, 255 (1984)
19. P. E. Holland, The Quantum Theory of Motion (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
20. R. E. Wyatt, Quantum Dynamics with Trajectories: Introduction to Quantum Hydrodynamics (Springer, 2005)
21. D. Dürr and S. Teufel, Bohmian Mechanics (Springer -Verlag, 2009)
22. A.A.V.V., Quantum Trajectories (ed. by Pratim Kuman Chattaraj, CRC Press, 2011)
23. A.A.V.V., Quantum Trajectories (ed. by K. H. Hughes and G. Parlant, CCP6, Daresbury, 2011)
24. A.A.V.V., Applied Bohmian Mechanics: from Nanoscale Systems to Cosmology (ed. by X. Oriols and J. Mompart, Pan Stanford Publishing, 2012)
25. A. Orefice, R. Giovanelli and D. Ditto, Found. Phys. 39, 256 (2009)
26. A. Orefice, R. Giovanelli and D. Ditto, Ref.[24], Chapter 7, p.425-453 (2012)
27. A. Orefice, R. Giovanelli and D. Ditto, Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie, 38 (2013)
28. A. Orefice, R. Giovanelli and D. Ditto, Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie, 40 (2015)
29. A. Orefice, R. Giovanelli and D. Ditto, (2016) arXiv:1604.05068v2 [quant-ph]