Questioning Everything About Quantum Mechanics

Quantum mechanics has always been kind of a weird concept.  The whole idea of reality coming down to a series of probabilities is not easy to wrap your head around.  However, in the early 20th century, there were two interpretations of quantum mechanics.  The first is what we know today, the probabilistic version most advocated by Niels Bohr, and the pilot-wave theory, proposed by Louis de but there has been a challenge to the standard model of quantum mechanics from the field of fluid dynamics.
Broglie.  People didn't really like Bohr's version, most notably Albert Einstein, which should have boded well for de Broglie's theory, since it was deterministic at its heart.  But for whatever reason, Bohr's theory caught on, and it didn't take long for pilot-wave theory to become a complete joke in the scientific community.  That's how it's remained for the past 80 years,

What is pilot-wave theory anyway?  It comes, obviously, from pilot waves, which form when ripples
in a liquid interact with each other.  De Broglie's theory said that particles work in the same way, as the effects of particles on each other cause the quantum effects we see in the double-slit experiment, for example.  According to probabilistic quantum theory, that effect is caused by the inherent unpredictability of the particles, but according to pilot-wave theory, the particles do have a definite path, we just can't determine it exactly.  The important part is that, theoretically anyway, if we knew the exact position of all particles in the universe at one time, we could determine their future paths with certainty.

So, where does fluid dynamics enter into this?  An experiment was recently done where a drop of silicon oil was placed in a liquid and the entire thing was vibrated.  At a certain frequency the drop bounced along the surface in the same way de Broglie proposed in the pilot-wave theory.  This was a curiosity that could not be ignored.  So, the scientists recreated the double-slit experiment in fluids, and found that the pilot waves would travel through both slits, while other droplets would pick one or the other.  They duplicated the results of the double-slit experiment within classical physics, which is, according to the standard model of quantum mechanics, impossible.  In many other tests, the liquids also duplicated the behavior of pilot-wave quantum theory, and the results are undeniably very interesting.

There's always a but with science, and of course, there's one here.  Right now, all we have is some interesting results from one experiment, and at this point, pilot-wave theory cannot explain many things that regular quantum mechanics can.  Given adequate research time, answers may be found, but there is the second and even bigger problem.  Physicists, on the whole, don't seem willing to give this theory a fair chance.  Pilot-wave theory never had a good reputation, and in our current system, reputation matters.  Who's going to give a grant to research a theory that nobody takes seriously?  Universities don't like to see their money disappear without positive results, and there's a very good chance pilot-wave theory comes up empty.  It's the nature of the field.  Results are nice, but you learn just as much from every negative answer, and who knows, maybe one of those crazy ideas you're sure can't be right actually wasn't so crazy after all.  You never know unless you test it.

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