Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Tuesday July 01 2014, @01:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the quantum-reality-is-just-classical-reality-in-really-tiny-bits? dept.

For nearly a century, "reality" has been a murky concept. The laws of quantum physics seem to suggest that particles spend much of their time in a ghostly state, lacking even basic properties such as a definite location and instead existing everywhere and nowhere at once. Only when a particle is measured does it suddenly materialize, appearing to pick its position as if by a roll of the dice. This idea that nature is inherently probabilistic -- that particles have no hard properties, only likelihoods, until they are observed -- is directly implied by the standard equations of quantum mechanics. But now a set of surprising experiments with fluids has revived old skepticism about that world-view. The bizarre results are fueling interest in an almost forgotten version of quantum mechanics, one that never gave up the idea of a single, concrete reality.

In a groundbreaking experiment, the Paris researchers used the droplet setup to demonstrate single- and double-slit interference. They discovered that when a droplet bounces toward a pair of openings in a damlike barrier, it passes through only one slit or the other, while the pilot wave passes through both. Repeated trials show that the overlapping wavefronts of the pilot wave steer the droplets to certain places and never to locations in between — an apparent replication of the interference pattern in the quantum double-slit experiment that Feynman described as "impossible ... to explain in any classical way." And just as measuring the trajectories of particles seems to "collapse" their simultaneous realities, disturbing the pilot wave in the bouncing-droplet experiment destroys the interference pattern.

Droplets can also seem to "tunnel" through barriers, orbit each other in stable "bound states," and exhibit properties analogous to quantum spin and electromagnetic attraction. When confined to circular areas called corrals, they form concentric rings analogous to the standing waves generated by electrons in quantum corrals. They even annihilate with subsurface bubbles, an effect reminiscent of the mutual destruction of matter and antimatter particles.

How about it Soylentils. Is there anyone here who groks Quantum Mechanics who would care to explain this in layman's terms? What shortcomings and/or benefits do you see with this theory?

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by JNCF on Tuesday July 01 2014, @10:23PM

    by JNCF (4317) on Tuesday July 01 2014, @10:23PM (#62739) Journal

    It seems odd to me that TFA didn't even make passing mention of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is also a fully deterministic theory. In the Copenhagen interpretation, when a particle interacts with something the universe selects one of the possible courses for the particle to take. In the many-worlds interpretation, the universe selects all possible courses for the particle to take. To human observers stuck in thing, it appears as if it only went the one route. I once bought a lottery ticket with quantum generated numbers, and in this universe it appears that I lost a dollar. But if an omnipotent observer were to look across the multiple worlds, it would appear as if I had lost way more money than that (lotteries obviously don't pay out on average, unless you play at just the right time).

    To my uneducated eyes, it seems that the Copenhagen interpretation is a silly attempt to make the universe work the way we expect it to. We're familiar with the idea of one world, and we don't like shrugging off familiar notions. We were familiar with a flat world, too. And a world with stars that orbited around it. If science has anything to tell us, it's that the universe is a damn strange place to live in. Don't expect the expected.