This book offers the revised and completed notes of lectures given at the 2007 conference, "Quantum Potential Theory: Structures and Applications to Physics." These lectures provide an introduction to the theory and discuss various applications.

This book offers the revised and completed notes of lectures given at the 2007 conference, "Quantum Potential Theory: Structures and Applications to Physics." These lectures provide an introduction to the theory and discuss various applications.

Introduction to fundamentals of potential functions covers the force of gravity, fields of force, potentials, harmonic functions, electric images and Green's function, sequences of harmonic functions, fundamental existence theorems, the logarithmic potential, and much more. Detailed proofs rigorously worked out. 1929 edition.

In virtue of its features, Bohm's quantum potential introduces interesting and relevant perspectives towards a satisfactory geometrodynamic description of quantum processes. This book makes a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of some of the most significant elements and results about the geometrodynamic picture determined by the quantum potential in various contexts. Above all, the book explores the perspectives about the fundamental arena subtended by the quantum potential, the link between the geometry associated to the quantum potential and a fundamental quantum vacuum. After an analysis of the geometry subtended by the quantum potential in the different fields of quantum physics (the non-relativistic domain, the relativistic domain, the relativistic quantum field theory, the quantum gravity domain and the canonical quantum cosmology), in the second part of the book, a recent interpretation of Bohm's quantum potential in terms of a more fundamental entity called quantum entropy, the approach of the symmetryzed quantum potential and the link between quantum potential and quantum vacuum are analysed, also in the light of the results obtained by the author.

An explanation of how quantum processes may be visualised without ambiguity, in terms of a simple physical model.

We are often told that quantum phenomena demand radical revisions of our scientific world view and that no physical theory describing well defined objects, such as particles described by their positions, evolving in a well defined way, let alone deterministically, can account for such phenomena. The great majority of physicists continue to subscribe to this view, despite the fact that just such a deterministic theory, accounting for all of the phe nomena of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, was proposed by David Bohm more than four decades ago and has arguably been around almost since the inception of quantum mechanics itself. Our purpose in asking colleagues to write the essays for this volume has not been to produce a Festschrift in honor of David Bohm (worthy an undertaking as that would have been) or to gather together a collection of papers simply stating uncritically Bohm's views on quantum mechanics. The central theme around which the essays in this volume are arranged is David Bohm's version of quantum mechanics. It has by now become fairly standard practice to refer to his theory as Bohmian mechanics and to the larger conceptual framework within which this is located as the causal quantum theory program. While it is true that one can have reservations about the appropriateness of these specific labels, both do elicit distinc tive images characteristic of the key concepts of these approaches and such terminology does serve effectively to contrast this class of theories with more standard formulations of quantum theory.

Potential theory grew out of mathematical physics, in particular out of the theory of gravitation and the theory of electrostatics. Mathematical physicists such as Poisson and Green introduced some of the central ideas of the subject. A mathematician with a general knowledge of analysis may find it useful to begin his study of classical potential theory by looking at its physical origins. Sections 2, 5 and 6 of these Notes give in part heuristic arguments based on physical considerations. These heuristic arguments suggest mathematical theorems and provide the mathematician with the problem of finding the proper hypotheses and mathematical proofs. These Notes are based on a one-semester course given by the author at Brown University in 1971. On the part of the reader, they assume a knowledge of Real Function Theory to the extent of a first year graduate course. In addition some elementary facts regarding harmonic functions are aS$umed as known. For convenience we have listed these facts in the Appendix. Some notation is also explained there. Essentially all the proofs we give in the Notes are for Euclidean 3-space R3 and Newtonian potentials ~.

Recently the interest in Bohm realist interpretation of quantum mechanics has grown. The important advantage of this approach lies in the possibility to introduce non-locality ab initio, and not as an “unexpected host”. In this book the authors give a detailed analysis of quantum potential, the non-locality term and its role in quantum cosmology and information. The different approaches to the quantum potential are analysed, starting from the original attempt to introduce a realism of particles trajectories (influenced by de Broglie’s pilot wave) to the recent dynamic interpretation provided by Goldstein, Durr, Tumulka and Zanghì, and the geometrodynamic picture, with suggestion about quantum gravity. Finally we focus on the algebraic reading of Hiley and Birkbeck school, that analyse the meaning of the non-local structure of the world, bringing important consequences for the space, time and information concepts.

Emergent quantum mechanics explores the possibility of an ontology for quantum mechanics. The resurgence of interest in "deeper-level" theories for quantum phenomena challenges the standard, textbook interpretation. The book presents expert views that critically evaluate the significance—for 21st century physics—of ontological quantum mechanics, an approach that David Bohm helped pioneer. The possibility of a deterministic quantum theory was first introduced with the original de Broglie-Bohm theory, which has also been developed as Bohmian mechanics. The wide range of perspectives that were contributed to this book on the occasion of David Bohm’s centennial celebration provide ample evidence for the physical consistency of ontological quantum mechanics. The book addresses deeper-level questions such as the following: Is reality intrinsically random or fundamentally interconnected? Is the universe local or nonlocal? Might a radically new conception of reality include a form of quantum causality or quantum ontology? What is the role of the experimenter agent? As the book demonstrates, the advancement of ‘quantum ontology’—as a scientific concept—marks a clear break with classical reality. The search for quantum reality entails unconventional causal structures and non-classical ontology, which can be fully consistent with the known record of quantum observations in the laboratory.

There is no sharp dividing line between the foundations of physics and philosophy of physics. This is especially true for quantum mechanics. The debate on the interpretation of quantum mechanics has raged in both the scientific and philosophical communities since the 1920s and continues to this day. (We shall understand the unqualified term ‘quantum mechanics’ to mean the mathematical formalism, i. e. laws and rules by which empirical predictions and theoretical advances are made. ) There is a popular rendering of quantum mechanics which has been publicly endorsed by some well known physicists which says that quantum mechanics is not only 1 more weird than we imagine but is weirder than we can imagine. Although it is readily granted that quantum mechanics has produced some strange and counter-intuitive results, the case will be presented in this book that quantum mechanics is not as weird as we might have been led to believe! The prevailing theory of quantum mechanics is called Orthodox Quantum Theory (also known as the Copenhagen Interpretation). Orthodox Quantum Theory endows a special status on measurement processes by requiring an intervention of an observer or an observer’s proxy (e. g. a measuring apparatus). The placement of the observer (or proxy) is somewhat arbitrary which introduces a degree of subjectivity. Orthodox Quantum Theory only predicts probabilities for measured values of physical quantities. It is essentially an instrumental theory, i. e.