  It is shown how, starting with the de Broglie - Bohm pilot-wave theory, one
can construct a new theory of the sort envisioned by several of QM's founders:
a Theory of Exclusively Local Beables (TELB). In particular, the usual quantum
mechanical wave function (a function on a high-dimensional configuration space)
is not among the beables posited by the new theory. Instead, each particle has
an associated ``pilot-wave'' field (living in physical space). A number of
additional fields (also fields on physical space) maintain what is described,
in ordinary quantum theory, as ``entanglement.'' The theory allows some
interesting new perspective on the kind of causation involved in pilot-wave
theories in general. And it provides also a concrete example of an empirically
viable quantum theory in whose formulation the wave function (on configuration
space) does not appear -- i.e., it is a theory according to which nothing
corresponding to the configuration space wave function need actually exist.
That is the theory's \emph{raison d'etre} and perhaps its only virtue. Its
vices include the fact that it only reproduces the empirical predictions of the
ordinary pilot-wave theory (equivalent, of course, to the predictions of
ordinary quantum theory) for spinless non-relativistic particles, and only then
for wave functions that are everywhere analytic. The goal is thus not to
recommend the TELB proposed here as a replacement for ordinary pilot-wave
theory (or ordinary quantum theory), but is rather to illustrate (with a crude
first stab) that it might be possible to construct a plausible, empirically
viable TELB, and to recommend this as an interesting and perhaps-fruitful
program for future research.
