Historical Debates over the Physical Reality of the Wave Function

TL;DR

The paper investigates whether the wave function is physically real by tracing its historical roots in the quantum foundations. It provides a detailed historical account of Einstein, de Broglie, Schrödinger, Born, Heisenberg, Bohr, Dirac, Bohm, and Everett, with particular focus on the shift from waves in three-dimensional space to a wave function in configuration space and the emergence or rejection of ontological status. The transition to configuration space is identified as a key factor in the early abandonment of wave-function realism, while Bohm's later defense and decoherence-inspired developments helped revive realism and informed Everett's many-worlds framework. The study clarifies why wave-function realism resurfaced in modern interpretations and how historical debates shaped the interpretation of quantum states and their ontological commitments.

Abstract

This paper provides a detailed historical account of early debates over wave-function realism, the modern term for the view that the wave function of quantum theory is physically real. As this paper will show, the idea of physical waves associated with particles had its roots in work by Einstein and de Broglie, who both originally thought of these waves as propagating in three-dimensional physical space. De Broglie quickly turned this wave-particle duality into an early pilot-wave theory, on which a particle's associated phase wave piloted or guided the particle along its trajectory. Schrödinger built on de Broglie's phase-wave hypothesis to provide a comprehensive account of the nascent quantum theory. However, Schrödinger's new undulatory mechanics came at the cost of replacing de Broglie's phase waves propagating in physical space with a wave function propagating in a system's abstract configuration space. The present work will argue that this move from three-dimensional physical space to a many-dimensional configuration space was a key reason why the founders of quantum theory uniformly abandoned the physical reality of the wave function. This paper will further clarify that de Broglie introduced two distinct pilot-wave theories, and will then argue that it was Bohm's rediscovery of the second of these two pilot-wave theories over two decades later, as well as Bohm's vociferous defense of wave-function realism, that were responsible for resurrecting the idea of an ontological wave function. This idea ended up playing a central role in Everett's development of the many-worlds interpretation.