Pilot Wave theory is making a comeback, as previous arguments against it are being struck down:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/pilot-wave-theory-gains-experimental-support-20160516/The dominant orthodox/conventional Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics says that the position of a particle is indeterminate until observation/interaction causes its probability function to collapse into a specific positional value. Meanwhile DeBroglie-Bohmian mechanics says that the position is defined, but it's the trajectory that is indeterminate and guided by a probabilistic wave function.
(Think of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which says you can't know both position and velocity of a particle at the same time. Copenhagen QM chooses to keep the trajectory well-defined but the position undefined/indeterminate, while DeBroglie-Bohm mechanics chooses to have the position well-defined but the trajectory undefined/indeterminate.)
If the Debroglie-Bohm mechanics can be seen as reliable and correct in its own right, then what are the implications of this? What are the advantages? What kind of devices will it allow us to engineer?
Note that orthodox/conventional(Copenhagen) QM with its perspective of indeterminate states has helped us to accomplish Quantum Computing, whereby the indeterminacy enables a broad spectrum of input states, rather than specific input states.
But so then DeBroglie-Bohm QM would see specific input state(s), proceeding by indeterminate path to some outcome. So just as indeterminacy of states can be expressed/exploited as indeterminacy of inputs (ie. many inputs together), then likewise indeterminacy of paths could be expressed/exploited as many paths together.
This could be useful when we want to start out from a specific starting point, and travel many routes at once, to discover which route is the least difficult.
By seeing quantum indeterminacy as all types of motion at once, instead of as all types of positions at once, we can construe motion as a transform, and then use Quantum Computing as a means to solve all possible transforms of a particular input state.
But leaving computing aside - does the idea of all possible velocities allow FTL velocities?
Conventional/orthodox QM implies it by saying a particle can tunnel from any position to any other position instantaneously - and it's from that we infer that the quantum particle is able to defy the speed limit of C. But DeBroglie-Bohmian mechanics would say this more explicitly - ie. "all possible velocities means all possible velocities" (for a tiny quantum particle).
If quantum experiments based on conventional/orthodox QM have demonstrated instantaneous displacement / Quantum Teleportation of particles (even large numbers of them) from one position to another, then what might experiments based on DeBroglie-Bohm mechanics show? Perhaps Quantum Acceleration - an instantaneous change in velocity (for tiny quantum particles) requiring no work whatsoever.
What if you were to do that for a large number of particles? Analogous to the idea of conventional QM teleporting a bunch of particles from one positional location to another arbitrarily distant one, what if you could likewise instantly accelerate a large number of particles to some arbitrarily high velocity? Could that be possible?
It was in the 1940s-50s that science fiction writers first came up with the idea of the "Jump Drive" for FTL travel. Isaac Asimov had them in his Foundation books, and Robert Heinlein had them in Starman Jones (still one of my favorite Heinlein novels). The "Jump Drive" allowed a spaceship to move from one part of space to another nearly instantaneously, like Quantum Teleportation allows for tiny quantum particles.
What would be the DeBroglie-Bohmian equivalent of this? Could it be called a "Jerk Drive"?
If the analogy holds true, you'd be able to instantaneously accelerate a particle (or group of particles) from one velocity frame to another. (Okay, for sci-fi purposes, we'd aspire to do this to an entire spaceship, not just a particle. When I think of those special fx on Star Trek, where the ship seems to elongate and flash out of sight, that's also how I'd imagine that space travel by Jerk Drive would look.)
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