Robert Brady, Ross Anderson
2014 · arXiv
In 2005, Couder, Protiere, Fort and Badouad showed that oil droplets bouncing on a vibrating tray of oil can display nonlocal interactions reminiscent of the particle-wave associations in quantum mechanics; in particular they can move, attract, repel and orbit each other. Subsequent experimental work by Couder, Fort, Protiere, Eddi, Sultan, Moukhtar, Rossi, Molacek, Bush and Sbitnev has established that bouncing drops exhibit single-slit and double-slit diffraction, tunnelling, quantised energy levels, Anderson localisation and the creation/annihilation of droplet/bubble pairs. In this paper we explain why. We show first that the surface waves guiding the droplets are Lorentz covariant with the characteristic speed c of the surface waves; second, that pairs of bouncing droplets experience an inverse-square force of attraction or repulsion according to their relative phase, and an analogue of the magnetic force; third, that bouncing droplets are governed by an analogue of Schroedinger's equation where Planck's constant is replaced by an appropriate constant of the motion; and fourth, that orbiting droplet pairs exhibit spin-half symmetry and align antisymmetrically as in the Pauli exclusion principle. Our analysis explains the similarities between bouncing-droplet experiments and the behaviour of quantum-mechanical particles. It also enables us to highlight some differences, and to predict some surprising phenomena that can be tested in feasible experiments.
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>Show me a macroscopic system that exhibits true wave-particle duality and can be used as an analogy for quantum systems, then I'll take it seriously. With the "true" in that sentence, we might be dealing with some moving goalposts, but this[0] is a well-known classical system which behaves similarly to a Bohmian description of QM and also exhibits interference, etc, on double-slit experiments. ----- [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4356.pdf
Not necessarily directly correlated, but I couldn't resist posting about the Couder/Fort oil drop experiments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9yWv5dqSKk https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.4356
See http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.4356, a paper by Ross Anderson and Robert Brady. They've since expanded the theory greatly, with other papers on arxiv. Also, check out this fascinating debate about these matters on Scott Aaronson's blog. Link is http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1255 Brady and Anderson have many posts in this debate, and IMHO, wind up winning. It's looking more and more like physics took a wrong turn with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
The work of Couder et al. on oil droplets might show a way for more of a "quantum intuition". It's a pity that the article does not mention this work. See eg. http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.4356
Allow me to not agree with your classification of the top article as "garbage." I've got from it more than from the text you linked to and I'm even less satisfied with your explanations whereas Natalie Wolchover did a rather good article. Please tell me if you have any background in physics, or what is your background? The major thing missing from the article for me is that she didn't mention that the co-author of the most recent paper on the topic is much more known as the security researcher than as somebody who does anything related to quantum physics: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.4356 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_J._Anderson http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/ He's author of (to me) very useful book "Security Engineering": http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html
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