Historical Debates over the Physical Reality of the Wave Function

TL;DR

This paper explores the historical debates on the physical reality of the wave function, highlighting key developments from Einstein and de Broglie to Bohm and Everett, and how these influenced modern quantum interpretations.

Contribution

It provides a detailed historical analysis of the evolution of wave-function realism and clarifies the roles of de Broglie, Bohm, and Everett in shaping current quantum ontologies.

Findings

The shift from physical space to configuration space was pivotal in abandoning wave function realism.

Bohm's rediscovery of a pilot-wave theory revived the ontological view of the wave function.

Wave-function realism became central to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Abstract

This paper provides a detailed historical account of early debates over wave-function realism, the modern term for the view that the wave function of quantum theory is physically real. As this paper will show, the idea of physical waves associated with particles had its roots in work by Einstein and de Broglie, who both originally thought of these waves as propagating in three-dimensional physical space. De Broglie quickly turned this wave-particle duality into an early pilot-wave theory, on which a particle's associated phase wave piloted or guided the particle along its trajectory. Schr\"odinger built on de Broglie's phase-wave hypothesis to provide a comprehensive account of the nascent quantum theory. However, Schr\"odinger's new undulatory mechanics came at the cost of replacing de Broglie's phase waves propagating in physical space with a wave function propagating in a system's abstract configuration space. The present work will argue that this move from three-dimensional physical space to a many-dimensional configuration space was a key reason why the founders of quantum theory uniformly abandoned the physical reality of the wave function. This paper will further clarify that de Broglie introduced two distinct pilot-wave theories, and will then argue that it was Bohm's rediscovery of the second of these two pilot-wave theories over two decades later, as well as Bohm's vociferous defense of wave-function realism, that were responsible for resurrecting the idea of an ontological wave function. This idea ended up playing a central role in Everett's development of the many-worlds interpretation.