The rules of the quantum world — where everything is probabilistic, until observation fixes it — may be a lot less indefinite than we thought. A new experiment shows that liquids have properties that physicists once thought were confined to the quantum level. And this could be a big breakthrough.
Essentially, it could change how we understand the behavior of quantum particles, by revealing the kinds of waves that control their seemingly-chaotic movements. Over at Quanta, Natalie Wolchover has a terrific article explaining the fluid experiment, and why classical mechanics might shed some light on the quantum world.
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 worldview. 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.
The experiments involve an oil droplet that bounces along the surface of a liquid. The droplet gently sloshes the liquid with every bounce. At the same time, ripples from past bounces affect its course. The droplet's interaction with its own ripples, which form what's known as a pilot wave, causes it to exhibit behaviors previously thought to be peculiar to elementary particles — including behaviors seen as evidence that these particles are spread through space like waves, without any specific location, until they are measured.
Particles at the quantum scale seem to do things that human-scale objects do not do. They can tunnel through barriers, spontaneously arise or annihilate, and occupy discrete energy levels. This new body of research reveals that oil droplets, when guided by pilot waves, also exhibit these quantum-like features.
To some researchers, the experiments suggest that quantum objects are as definite as droplets, and that they too are guided by pilot waves — in this case, fluid-like undulations in space and time. These arguments have injected new life into a deterministic (as opposed to probabilistic) theory of the microscopic world first proposed, and rejected, at the birth of quantum mechanics.
"This is a classical system that exhibits behavior that people previously thought was exclusive to the quantum realm, and we can say why," said John Bush, a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has led several recent bouncing-droplet experiments. "The more things we understand and can provide a physical rationale for, the more difficult it will be to defend the 'quantum mechanics is magic' perspective."
Read the rest at Quanta