“So the average distribution of everything in the Universe provides a frame of reference against which such changes are measured. Somehow, the ‘local’ object is influenced by everything ‘out there’… The Pilot Wave Interpretation… applies to the whole Universe. The behaviour of a single particle here and now depends on the positions of every other particle in the Universe at this instant.” (Gribbin, p.50)
This passage is unusually revealing, not because it is careless, but because it is careful in exactly the wrong places. In attempting to make the pilot‑wave interpretation intelligible, it exposes a familiar pattern of explanatory strain: when a local phenomenon resists a locally mechanistic story, explanation is inflated until it becomes cosmological.
From guidance to governance
The pilot‑wave picture begins modestly. A particle has a definite position; a wave guides its motion. This already does important rhetorical work: it promises to restore determinacy without retreating to classical trajectories. But notice how quickly the language of guidance becomes language of governance.
The quote does not merely say that the wave extends beyond the particle, or even beyond the apparatus. It says that the average distribution of everything in the Universe supplies a frame of reference against which the particle’s behaviour is determined. The pilot wave is no longer a local field or even a global solution to an equation; it is a universal condition that must be consulted, continuously, for every local event.
At this point the explanatory burden has not been reduced. It has been displaced.
Mach’s Principle as explanatory lever
The invocation of Mach’s Principle is doing quiet but decisive work here. Mach’s idea—that inertia reflects relations to the mass distribution of the Universe—already sits uneasily between description and explanation. It redescribes a local property (inertia) in global terms without specifying a mechanism by which the global becomes locally effective.
In Gribbin’s presentation, Mach’s Principle becomes a precedent: since some local properties may depend on the whole Universe, perhaps this local behaviour does too. But this is an analogy, not an explanation. The mystery is not resolved; it is universalised.
What is being smuggled in is the idea that reference to “everything out there” is explanatory rather than merely classificatory. The phrase sounds powerful, but it functions as a placeholder for precisely what remains unaccounted for.
Non‑locality without limits
Non‑locality is often introduced as a technical feature with sharp constraints. Here it becomes effectively unbounded. The behaviour of a single particle “here and now” is said to depend on the positions of every other particle in the Universe at this instant.
This raises an immediate but telling question: in what sense is this dependence operative rather than stipulative? No channel, structure, or mode of constraint is specified. Instead, the Universe is treated as a simultaneously given totality whose complete state is, somehow, always already available to every local process.
The pilot wave has quietly become a cosmological oracle.
The return of the absolute
Throughout this series, a recurring move has been the reintroduction of absolutes under relational vocabulary: electrons that know, systems that decide, waves that collapse, universes that coordinate outcomes from afar. The pilot‑wave universe repeats this move at a higher level.
By appealing to “the whole Universe at this instant,” the account reinstates a privileged global state—a cosmic snapshot—against which all local events are determined. This is not a relational account; it is a universal reference frame wearing relational clothing.
The irony is sharp. An interpretation introduced to avoid indeterminacy ends up requiring a form of total determination so strong that it borders on metaphysical omniscience.
What the strain reveals
The strain here is not that the pilot‑wave interpretation is wrong, but that it is doing more explanatory work than its own resources can support. When pressed to account for local regularities without invoking collapse or observer‑dependence, it expands its explanatory scope until the Universe itself becomes the mechanism.
At that point, explanation has reached its inflationary limit. Nothing has been clarified about how local behaviour is constrained; we are only told that it is constrained—by everything.
This prepares the ground for the final move of the arc. Across collapse, Copenhagen, many‑worlds, and now pilot waves, the same pattern repeats: explanatory pressure produces ontological excess. What is needed is not a bigger universe doing more work, but a different understanding of what it means to instantiate a phenomenon at all.
That landing will not require cosmic coordination, hidden variables, or universal frames of reference—only a clean cut between potential and event.
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