A Survey on Bohmian Mechanics

Abstract

Bohmian mechanics is the most naively obvious embedding imaginable of Schr\"odinger's equation into a completely coherent physical theory. It describes a world in which particles move in a highly non-Newtonian sort of way, one which may at first appear to have little to do with the spectrum of predictions of quantum mechanics. It turns out, however, that as a consequence of the defining dynamical equations of Bohmian mechanics, when a system has wave function $\psi$ its configuration is typically random, with probability density $\rho$ given by $|\psi|^2$, the quantum equilibrium distribution. It also turns out that the entire quantum formalism, operators as observables and all the rest, is a consequence of Bohmian mechanics.