Anyways, I think I’ve said all I want to say in his thread - any time you want to discuss pilot wave theory, @Jim, just tag me. 
I beg to differ with your representation here. I think it’s pretty unusual that something observable is matching so many aspects of what science is telling us of the quantum realm. It’s much more than just a coincidence, and way beyond a resemblance. I’d say it’s the quoted representation and analogy that are fundamentally unrelated.
I won’t say it’s unreasonable to take the route you’re taking, but I would say it’s less reasonable than how I see it. 
But that’s probably just something we’ll have to agree to disagree on.
As far as I know, judgments are subjective. Bayes theorem may help in making the call, but I don’t see how it can objectively dictate such a call.
Maybe not. But they might come pretty close to saying it. And I wouldn’t be surprised that off the record they might even admit to it.
Um, that video doesn’t come close to saying that the drop experiments are evidence for PWT. All that the scientist does is describe the experiment and how it shows some quantum-like behavior, and all that Morgan Freeman says is “maybe the quantum world is like this” - they aren’t saying anything more than that the bouncing drop experiment can act as a model for PWT.
And @Jim, I really recommend looking up some articles from actual pilot-wave physicists to learn about the theory. You boldly assert that the correspondence between PWT and the bouncing drop experiment is “way beyond resemblance”, but you are ignoring the very deep differences between them, some of which I’ve pointed out. The SEP article on Bohmian mechanics is one great place to start.
The presenter in the droplet video, Derek Muller, says this at the end of the demonstration:
I think it is great that we have two competing theories for the same experiments, and they both ask you to accept odd things, just different odd things, and it comes down to what you are comfortable with really, whether you prefer the Copenhagen interpretation of standard quantum mechanics, or a pilot wave theory.
…so even he is saying exactly as the others on this thread, that to this point no experiments have discriminated the underlying reality which yields the experimental results, and most certainly not this one which is entirely classical.
This from the YouTube comments under the demonstration brought a smile:
I feel most comfortable with a superposition of both the Copenhagen interpretation and the pilot wave interpretation at the same time.
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I’m not sure but there may be a disconnect here. Let me see if this is helpful.
The question I’m concerned with has nothing to do with description, behavior, mechanism, or equation. It’s about interpreting what the entity in question is. Is it a wave or a particle, or a wave and a particle?
From results of experiments like the double slit, what I’m saying about the silicon droplets experiment is that it is evidence to support the wave and particle interpretation. Does that change anything, or was it clear all along that was what I was talking about?
I tend to side with those who think the silicon droplet experiment is an analogy, not experimental demonstration of pilot wave theory. Another good example is the rubber sheet analogy used to illustrate the relationship between gravity and the bending of spacetime. The rubber sheet experiment doesn’t support GR, it merely allows us to visualize it better.
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You’ve got a point there. However, I’m still not quite convinced. It seems to me that what’s going on with the silicon droplets is something to give credence to the idea of a particle and a wave together.
I could be mistaken, but I’m pretty sure that before the silicon experiment there weren’t too many people who thought that the particle and wave could coherently explain the results of experiments with quantum behavior like the double slit.
If it had been shown in some other fashion prior to that then I would agree that it’s no more than a way to get a picture of the the idea behind the explanation. But if not, I think it provided needed evidence that a particle and wave together could explain in a coherent manner the findings of how quantum objects behaved.
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I think (finally!) I can see where you are coming from here, @Jim. There is one way the bouncing drop experiment could in some sense serve as evidence for the pilot wave theory: and that is if we didn’t already know that a particle guided by a wave could reproduce quantum phenomena, then the observation of the bouncing drop experiment would increase our probability that PWT could be successful in explaining what we observe.
(That wouldn’t give PWT any evidential leg up on other theories, since until the math was all worked out it wouldn’t be certain that PWT could exactly reproduce all the quantum phenomena - but it would be an indication that exploring PWT could be fruitful.)
As it actually stands, the bouncing drop experiment doesn’t serve as evidence in this way for the scientific community at large, because it was known well beforehand - mathematically proven in the early 1950’s by Bohm - that PWT is fully capable of reproducing all the experimental predictions of standard QM. But since even many physicists were or still are unaware of this, the bouncing drop experiment at the very least raised the level of awareness about the viability of pilot wave theory, and in a sense served as evidence for it for those individuals.
My apologies, @Jim, I should have seen that sooner.
Edit to add this note: I’m using the hedge words “in some sense” because it doesn’t precisely fit into the way I’ve defined evidence or empirical support in the above discussion, and I still think I have a good rough definition there. But it may be that a refinement of my definition could show that (in those specific epistemic situations) the bouncing drop experiment would count as genuine evidence for pilot wave theory, making it okay to drop the hedge words.
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(Note starting at 10:03 “the amazing analogy” – emphasis in the original [haha 
])
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Yes, you are mistaken. The guided wave interpretation has been formulated and developed well before the silicon drop experiment. If you are interested in the experimental foundations of QM, I continue to recommend the Through Two Doors at Once book. Physicist propose counter-intuitive views of reality because experimentation yields counter-intuitive results. I like guided wave too, but it remains an aesthetic preference. As well, I recognize that rigor here is well beyond my mathematical training, so I accept expert opinion.
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To be fair (depending on your reference group for “not too many people”) @Jim is right about this, but that is due to the general lack of awareness about pilot wave theory, not because of a lack of available information in the literature, as you point out @RonSewell. So you are right too. 
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He also says (ca. 10:40) that the de Broglie-Bohm PWT is certainly wrong because it doesn’t account for relativity.
That means it’s at best incomplete.
Is that current? The video was produced three years ago.
This is correct, but there are relativistic formulations of pilot wave theory that have been suggested. None of them are fully worked out to be able to encompass all of QFT, however, at least not yet.
But in the same sense, standard quantum mechanics and special relativity are both wrong as well.
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Thanks.
Considering the present discussion here, it’s interesting that this got bumped today:
The Pilot Wave Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
The idea itself is worth pursuing even if the silicon droplet demonstration didn’t exist.
If by “people” you mean the general public, that may be true. However, I don’t think many physicists were swayed by the demonstration, but they can be swayed by experiments that directly test the theory.
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Analogies are useful to conceptualize in lots of disciplines, but they don’t constitute proof or evidence for the reality.
Take electronics, for example. A diaphragm across a pipe (or imagine a double-ended bladder tank) preventing direct current flow is an analog for a capacitor, and an inline braided hose hydraulic pulse suppressor conceptually functions similarly to an inductor.
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Or motors. 
OK. I’m just trying to make sense of all of this. From what I’ve read standard QM and PWT equations are empirically equivalent. If I understand that term correctly it means that even though they are different ways of expressing the behavior they are describing, they arrive at the same answer.
In other words they are both correct in the end and it’s more a matter of preference as to which formulation is used. If that’s correct, wouldn’t it follow that choosing one formulation over another would not change in any way the behavior being described, nor the object of the behavior being described?
But now you are talking about labels. 