In 1927 two views about quantum phenomena were proposed. One was Bohr’s complementarity view, founded on Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations, leading to the Copenhagen interpretation and to Hilbert space formalism. The other was de Broglie’s double solution hypothesis, implying the existence of a Pilot-wave effect along the corpuscle’s trajectory. Bohr’s view would prevail given the implications of the Heisenberg relations, state superposition and the existence of non-locality, seeming to disprove the pilot-wave approach. On the other hand, the Copenhagen Interpretation still carries a heavy metaphysical load on the epistemological limits of human knowledge, while giving no explicit relation between indeterministic and deterministic behaviors in Nature. Over the last years the Hydrodynamic Quantum Analogs (HQA) field has been developing [1]. A droplet can be put to bounce on an oil bath, creating a quasi-monochromatic wave field that guides the droplet along a non-classical trajectory [2]. Although several quantum cases have been experimentally modeled by their analogs, HQA cannot provide an empirical picture of the quantum world. However, it does indicate a conceptual framework favoring a realism-based approach, while keeping the standard formalism of quantum mechanics. Another striking feature in HQA is that the field encodes information about the droplet’s path [3], thus being a memory carrier structure. In my talk I wish to extend this idea to quantum phenomena. Adopting de Broglie’s realism, I will propose that a quantum wave acts as a nomological memory for the corpuscle behavior, encoding the probability density of all its positions and momentum within the wave. I will further suggest that a complete description of quantum phenomena involves both a pilot-wave dynamics for the particle and a standard QM formalism for the information [4]. I will assess two objections to this, coming from the uncertainty relations and the non-locality, providing a possible answer to each.

[1] Bush, J. W. M., Oza A. U., 2021, Hydrodynamic quantum analogs. Reports on Progress in Physics, IOP Publishing.
[2] Couder, Y., Protière, S., Fort, E. and Boudaoud, A. 2005 Walking and orbiting droplets, Nature 437 208
[3] Fort, E., Eddi, A., Boudaoud, A., Moukhtar, J. and Couder, Y. 2010 Path-memory induced quantization of classical orbits Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 107 17515–20
[4] Castro, P., Bush, J. W. M., Croca, J. R. (editors) Advances in Pilot Wave Theory – From Experiments to Foundations, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, forthcoming, 2023.