Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Ever heard of pilot wave theory? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie%E2%80%93Bohm_theo... It's an easy visualization that can be shown with speakers and liquid



Here's one interesting silicone oil pilot-wave video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmC0ygr08tE


But to fit experimental observations, the "wave" would have to be faster than light.


Yeah. On the other hand it does give decent intuition about how certain interactions would result, especially if talking about massive particles traveling much slower than light.

I remember reading an article here a while back that involved a macroscopic re-creation of the double slit experiment results, but where mere observation remained possible, because light did not sufficiently influence the substrate. In that experiment the particles were droplets traveling on top of a set of waves, working in the pilot wave fashion.

Any attempt to use anything of similar scale to the particles to observe which slit the drop went through would break the interference pattern, but mere light did not, allowing one to visually see how a pilot wave style interpretation could work, if it were not for that whole (photons travel at the speed of light, so these would need to be faster than light propagating pilot waves) thing.

Indeed it looks like flubert linked a video from an earlier study of the same basic mechanics, prior to the more recent one that included the double slit experiment replication.


I was under the impression that the double slit experiment with the oil drops does not replicate the quantum mechanics expected interference pattern.

http://math.mit.edu/~bush/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/...




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: