Deflating the Aharonov-Bohm Effect

Understand

I argue that the metaphysical import of the Aharonov-Bohm effect has been overstated: correctly understood, it does not require either rejection of gauge invariance or any novel form of nonlocality.

• The conclusion that it does require one or the other follows from a failure to keep track, in the analysis, of the complex scalar field to which the magnetic vector potential is coupled.
• Once this is recognised, the way is clear to a local account of the ontology of electrodynamics (or at least, to an account no more nonlocal than quantum theory in general requires); I sketch a possible such account.