# Question regarding the Bohm interpretation

I tryed to understand the Bohm interpretation and this is what picture appeared to me. Please tell me if I understood something incorrectly.

• All particles have definite positions and follow deterministic rules of dynamics

• Any future configuration of an isolated subsystem is only dependent on initial conditions

• Even slight difference in initial conditions may result in huge differences in the result.

The problem is that those initial conditions, are inherently unknown. This is fundamental: even if an observer manages to measure the whole Bohm state of the entire universe, he still would not know the Bohm state of himself.

This is like making predictions bout future states of a three-body system based on Newtonian mechanics with initial coordinates known only with finite precision. Due to apparent chaoticity of the solution the possible results may be dramatically different.

Correct me if I am wrong.

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This is correct. I don't see a question however. It's a little worse than what you say--- the Bohm particle positions are inherently unobservable because all you can see is the Everett branch they select to make real, and that's not enough information to determine anything at all about the positions, beyond a vague probability distribution as $|\psi|^2$. – Ron Maimon Jul 22 '12 at 9:54
As I understand there are no Everett branches in Bohm interpretation. – Anixx Jul 22 '12 at 12:18
There is a full QM wavefunction in Bohm, so there are branches. The branches are always there in QM, the only question is whether you consider the unobserved branch "real" or "unreal" (which is positivistically meaningless). The only difference in Bohm is that one of the branches has particles running around, this is the real branch, and the other branches are empty, so they are unreal. So real/unreal is determined dynamically. But they are still there in the formalism to reproduce the interference from far-away branches recohering. You can see this by Bohmian simulation of Shor's algorithm. – Ron Maimon Jul 22 '12 at 19:32
Where would I find a published account of the Bohmian simulation of Shor's algorithm? That sounds interesting. – Francis Davey Feb 3 at 12:23
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