Dear Prof. Klein,
It is rather amusing to me that people, such as you and I, who have been so involved with superconductivity, have become interested in similar aspects of quantum theory. The theoretical calculations I did early in my career led in my later life to a questioning of what exactly the wave function represents.
I thoroughly enjoyed your essay, especially the examination of what the EPR paper sought to accomplish, and what Bell's later work added to these constructs.
However, my mesoscopic experiments involving electron waves in small structures leads to an understanding of the electron as a physical wave filling the space it inhabits. The idea of a simultaneous point particle and an associated wave is not necessary.
I don't think of neutrons and protons the same way -- the associated small bag of quarks is really confined to a small region. Multi-neutron scattering events for, say, crystallography can be described by a flux of confined (read that PARTICLE) states impinging on a crystal lattice, which responds with its characteristic phonon modes, leading to the the emitted neutron pattern. Within the neutron, however, the elementary quark states are again true quantum waves.
Therefore, I suggest that a statistical description of fundamental particle waves are physical waves (with quantized spin and charge) that naturally lead to the measurable quantities we observe.
My views are in line with Dr. Kadin' essay http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1296. He is trying to build QM from first principles, making sure all the assumptions handed to us as grad students are valid before proceeding with the next step.
I would be interested in how you believe the Pauli exclusion principle arises from fermionic wave functions. I have not yet seen a discussion of how it can naturally arise from the self-energy or any self-consistency principles.