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The pilot-wave dynamics of walking droplets

MITMathLab · 206.8K views · 2012-12-19 · 3:00

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Overview

A short MIT Math Lab video showing millimetric droplets bouncing and walking across a vibrating fluid bath, guided by their own pilot waves. These droplets show diffraction, tunneling and quantized orbits, which were once thought to belong only to quantum systems.

On Hacker News

Cited in pilot-wave theory threads as a vivid visualization of how quantum-like behavior can arise in a classical system.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2016–2017

Topics

Everyday physics & science demosQuantum physics
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pilot wavewalking dropletsquantum analogsfluid dynamicscouder

What people said

appleflaxen · 2017-08 · Recommendation

this isn't theoretical, but is a nice visualization of the ideas behind the pilot wave/particle system [VIDEO] the plot at 1:40 is where my mind was blown.

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eln1 · 2016-11 · Reference

As the main hypothesis in this paper is that the momentum is transferred by pilot waves, it is worth to emphasize the (cited there) most known recent approaches - Couder's experiments which use classical object with wave-particle duality (droplet coupled with waves it creates), getting e.g. interference in double-slit, orbit quantization and many other quantum-like phenomena: [LINK] [VIDEO]

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goldenkey · 2016-05 · Reference

I'm just going to leave these links for those as curious as I was: [LINK] [LINK] [Video: The pilot-wave dynamics of walking droplets] [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by MITMathLab, played through YouTube.

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