I found this an interesting read. Particles in pilot waves exhibit some of the behaviors in the famous double slit experiment and other quantum phenomenon. De Broglie, the first to realize that matter must have a wave function, first proposed pilot waves as a possible interpretation of QM, but that didn't catch on and lost out to the Copenhagen Interpretation. The Copenhagen Interpretation never seemed so much an interpretation as a throwing up of the hands and crying out "whatever, the math works."
QuoteIn 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 â€" 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.
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-new-quantum-reality/
I just noticed Stromboli posted a link to this article. Please merge or delete this one. Thanks.
Lol whatever. You are more qualified to discuss it than I am. :biggrin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnUBaBdl0Aw
Ok, so what I'm getting out of this, as a layman, is that if the Pilot Wave theory is correct (and this experiment isn't proof, just some interesting evidence on the macro scale), it means that quantum weirdness is NOT random, it is just that we cannot measure the hidden variables because any attempt to do so messes up the experiment. This could mean that that there are predicable variables controlling QM, but we have no current method of observing them without disturbing them at the same time.
Am I even close here?
BTW Popeyes Pappy, thanks for the link! That video helped explain it in layman terms for me.
Quote from: Aroura33 on July 01, 2014, 12:46:47 AM
Ok, so what I'm getting out of this, as a layman, is that if the Pilot Wave theory is correct (and this experiment isn't proof, just some interesting evidence on the macro scale), it means that quantum weirdness is NOT random, it is just that we cannot measure the hidden variables because any attempt to do so messes up the experiment. This could mean that that there are predicable variables controlling QM, but we have no current method of observing them without disturbing them at the same time.
Am I even close here?
BTW Popeyes Pappy, thanks for the link! That video helped explain it in layman terms for me.
You've got it, with one minor nuance. The main thing to change is "no current method" to "no method ever". The variables will remain forever hidden from us because of the uncertainty relations.
Quote from: aileron on July 01, 2014, 01:13:48 AM
You've got it, with one minor nuance. The main thing to change is "no current method" to "no method ever". The variables will remain forever hidden from us because of the uncertainty relations.
Ah, that makes sense. I just spent some time discussing with my husband discussing why it is "no method ever", and I get that now as well. Thanks for the clarification. :)
I don't see how pilot waves are any different than "whatever, the math works."
Quote from: Hakurei Reimu on July 01, 2014, 06:31:14 PM
I don't see how pilot waves are any different than "whatever, the math works."
^^^
This.
Whatever it's the Copenhagen, the wave collapse, the many-world or the pilot wave, all of those are "interpretations" and they lead to nowhere. At a deeper scale, people are still hung up on classical physics. They can't accept that at subatomic scale, objects do not fall into the neat classification of either a particle or a wave. The universe does not owe us to give us such neat classification. We have wave packets that can sometimes behave like a particle, and sometimes like a wave. QM is adequate enough to describe that world, a description which escapes ordinary vocabulary and can only be appreciated through math.
For those math-inclined nerds, see
The Essential Quantum Mechanics (http://soi.blogspot.ca/2014/02/the-essential-quantum-mechanics.html)
The Essential Quantum Field Theory (http://soi.blogspot.ca/2014/04/the-essential-quantum-field-theory.html)
Quantum Fields in Curved Space-Time (http://soi.blogspot.ca/2014/06/quantum-fields-in-curved-space-time.html)
Thanks for the video PopeyesPappy! And thanks for the info JP! I think even in the macro world things are waves and particles, with the micro world having the wave part dominate, and in the macro world the particle part dominates, and photons being in equal parts. What exactly are the waves? Vibrating strings causing Waves in spacetime, or are they imaginary? Solitary