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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Wave-particle duality of Couder's walking droplets?
« on: 14/01/2013 08:05:15 »
Indeed it is providing nice picture (and intuitions) of some really abstract ideas of quantum mechanics.
For example here is Feynman quote about interference from his QM book:
« … In this chapter we shall tackle immediately the basic element of the mysterious behavior in its most strange form. We choose to examin a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way and which is at the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality it contains the only mystery. We cannot make the mystery go away by explaining how it works . We will just tell you how it works.… »
Which is no longer true ...
The goal is instead of just "shut up and calculate" as everybody do, finally try to understand quantum mechanics, especially the wave-particle duality. Orthodox view often says that e.g. electron is just its wavefunction - completely forgetting about the particle nature. Couder's experiments show that being simultaneously both wave and particle (which goes a concrete trajectory) does not prevent e.g. quantum interference. And so we need to to get below the Schroedinger picture - see wavefunction as emerging from hidden dynamics of an object with wave-particle duality...
What lead me a few years ago to conclusion that corpuscular nature does not prevent quantum behavior was working on Maximal Entropy Random Walk(MERW) for my last PhD. It occurs that standard way of choosing transition probabilities in stochastic models usually only approximates the basic principle thermodynamical models should be based on: the maximal uncertainty principle. Doing it finally right in MERW-like approaches lead to similar local behavior, but usually completely different global behavior: while standard approach has weak localization properties (in opposite to QM!), this time it thermalizes exactly to the quantum ground state probability density (squares of coordinates of dominant eigenvector of Hamiltonian).
For example here is evolution from point distribution on defected lattice (with removed some vertices: squares):
So properly made thermodynamics of corpuscular objects (like these bouncing droplets), turns out in agreement with thermodynamical predictions of quantum mechanics - as we should expect. This "classical" model also gives natural intuitions of many "quantum" properties, like "squares" relating amplitudes with probabilities.
Here is our PRL paper, preliminary version of thesis, presentation, simulator.
For example here is Feynman quote about interference from his QM book:
« … In this chapter we shall tackle immediately the basic element of the mysterious behavior in its most strange form. We choose to examin a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way and which is at the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality it contains the only mystery. We cannot make the mystery go away by explaining how it works . We will just tell you how it works.… »
Which is no longer true ...
The goal is instead of just "shut up and calculate" as everybody do, finally try to understand quantum mechanics, especially the wave-particle duality. Orthodox view often says that e.g. electron is just its wavefunction - completely forgetting about the particle nature. Couder's experiments show that being simultaneously both wave and particle (which goes a concrete trajectory) does not prevent e.g. quantum interference. And so we need to to get below the Schroedinger picture - see wavefunction as emerging from hidden dynamics of an object with wave-particle duality...
What lead me a few years ago to conclusion that corpuscular nature does not prevent quantum behavior was working on Maximal Entropy Random Walk(MERW) for my last PhD. It occurs that standard way of choosing transition probabilities in stochastic models usually only approximates the basic principle thermodynamical models should be based on: the maximal uncertainty principle. Doing it finally right in MERW-like approaches lead to similar local behavior, but usually completely different global behavior: while standard approach has weak localization properties (in opposite to QM!), this time it thermalizes exactly to the quantum ground state probability density (squares of coordinates of dominant eigenvector of Hamiltonian).
For example here is evolution from point distribution on defected lattice (with removed some vertices: squares):
So properly made thermodynamics of corpuscular objects (like these bouncing droplets), turns out in agreement with thermodynamical predictions of quantum mechanics - as we should expect. This "classical" model also gives natural intuitions of many "quantum" properties, like "squares" relating amplitudes with probabilities.
Here is our PRL paper, preliminary version of thesis, presentation, simulator.