Very interesting.
Dave -----Original Message----- From: Harry Veeder <hveeder...@gmail.com> To: vortex-l <vortex-l@eskimo.com> Sent: Sat, Mar 30, 2013 12:07 am Subject: Re: [Vo]:Emergent Quantum Mechanics On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 11:46 PM, Harry Veeder <hveeder...@gmail.com> wrote: http://www.nonlinearstudies.at/quantummechanics.php Emergent Quantum Mechanics One is here reminded of Feynman’s famous discussion of the double slit, and his introductory remark: "We choose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way and has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery." However, the above-mentioned recent classical physics experiments not only disprove Feynman’s statement w.r.t. the double slit, but prove that a whole set of “quantum” features can be shown to occur in completely classical ones, among them being the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, indeterministic behaviour of a particle despite a deterministic evolution of its statistical ensemble over many runs, nonlocal interaction, tunnelling, and, of course, a combination of all these. We are referring to the beautiful series of experiments performed by the group of Yves Couder using small liquid drops that can be kept bouncing on the surface of a bath of the same fluid for an unlimited time when the substrate oscillates vertically. These “bouncers” can become coupled to the surface waves they generate and thus become “walkers” moving at constant velocity on the liquid surface. A “walker” is defined by a lock-in phenomenon so that the drop falls systematically on the forward front of the wave generated by its previous bouncings. It is thus a “symbiotic” dynamical phenomenon consisting of the moving droplet dressed with the Faraday wave packet it emits. Couder and Fort report on single-particle diffraction and interference of walkers. They show “how this wavelike behaviour of particle trajectories can result from the feedback of a remote sensing of the surrounding world by the waves they emit”. Of course, the “walkers” of Couder’s group, despite showing so many features they have in common with quantum systems, cannot be employed one-to-one as a model for the latter, with the most obvious difference being that quantum systems are not restricted to two-dimensional surfaces. However, along with the understanding of how the Schrödinger equation can be derived via nonequilibrium thermodynamics, also the mutual relationship of particle and wave behaviour has become clearer. A video of the "walkers" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmC0ygr08tE The pilot-wave dynamics of walking droplets Harry
