* A Q-thruster is a thruster which pushes off of the zero point fluctuations in vacuum, which is still not understood.
Quote:
Although the idea of a pilot wave or realist interpretation of quantum mechanics is not the dominant view of physics today (which favors the Copenhagen interpretation), it has seen a strong resurgence of interest over the last decade based on some experimental work pioneered by Couder and Fort [13]. Couder and Fort discovered that bouncing a millimeter-sized droplet on a vibrating shallow fluid bath at just the right resonance frequency created a scenario where the bouncing droplet created a wave pattern on the shallow bath that also seemed to guide the droplet along its way. To Couder and Fort, this seemed very similar to the pilot-wave concept just discussed and, in subsequent testing by Couder and others, this macroscopic classical system was able to exhibit characteristics thought to be restricted to the quantum realm. To date, this hydrodynamic pilot-wave analog system has been able to duplicate the double slit experiment findings, tunneling, quantized orbits, and numerous other quantum phenomena. Bush put together two thorough review papers chronicling the experimental work being done in this domain by numerous universities [14,15].
If you try to claim, without evidence, that pilot waves predict different behavior than standard quantum mechanics, you might deserve that downvote.
Pilot waves are a mathematical framework, they may be useful mathematical tricks in some cases, but they don't predict new behavior AFAIK.
I've been to talks about Couder et al's work, and the authors don't argue that pilot waves are validated as descriptions of the universe by their work. They do demonstrate a novel macroscopic system that observes the laws of classical mechanics, and under certain circumstances, behavior emerges that is nicely described by the pilot wave equations. This does not mean that pilot waves are somehow a more fundamentally correct description of what's really going on.
This is exactly analogous to statistical mechanics (e.g. the ideal gas law) arising from classical Newtonian mechanics when you assume no specific knowledge about gas particles (individual positions or velocities), just aggregate mass and energy.
An experiment that "proves" an extension of pilot wave theory might be, e.g., observing that decay rates of radioactive isotopes are affected by being in a quantum corral or something like that. An experiment that shows there is a more fundamental, and influenceable process underlying phenomenon that the standard interpretation treats as frequentist.
For this reason it could be easily argued that theoretical physicists should be spending more time on pilot wave theory since it is this sort of theory from which future advances would come, vs the standard interpretation which puts up a semantic stop sign and says "proceed no further".
That's a remarkably incorrect statement. Let's see:
* The "standard model" is a quantum field theory and has essentially nothing to do with this discussion.
* Standard quantum mechanism says nothing about frequentist vs Bayesian interpretations of anything.
* Standard quantum mechanism is a deterministic theory, too. Take a look at the Schrödinger equation: it's deterministic.
Determinism is tricky. Suppose you have a particle doing its thing (going through double slits or whatever) and then you measure its position. In standard QM, you have two choices: you use the Born rule (or a fancier version -- I like the POVM formalism) and get a distribution of outcomes and a new post-measurement wavefunction, or you can include the measurement apparatus in your system and you end up with many worlds. In PWT, I think you have two similar choices. You can start with a distribution of your (hidden) initial condition and get an resulting distribution over the outcomes (which will be the same as the Born rule distribution if you calculate it correctly). If you do this, you still need to model decoherence, and I believe it looks at least as artificial as the standard QM case. Alternatively, you could presumably add degrees of freedom and more hidden variables to describe the measurement apparatus and you end up with an IMO extremely messy version of many worlds.
<aside>My personal view is that standard QM with many worlds is the best theory we have. If you start with the many worlds hypothesis and assume that it's totally impractical to devise an experiment that actually detects coherence between large-scale states, you can ignore this coherence, average it out, recover the Born rule, etc, as an approximation. IOW I think that decoherence is a limitation of our ability to build crazy experiments rather than a fundamental property of the universe.</aside>
However, walking droplets shows that relativistic and quantum effects can be explained in terms of Newtonian physics. For example, just by looking at walking droplet experiment with two slits, I can say that speed of sound in water is constant and it isotropic regardless of speed of particle, because waves around particle are propagating, so water is not moving at all (unless wave is really big, so path to travel will be longer). It is easy to understand. It also explains why Michelson-Morley experiment failed.
It's not constant. It varies by temperature.
This is why you're getting down voted. You're asserting a very minority view in physics as a certainty, while making sweeping statements that contradict a high school physics education.
You are placing way too much weight on youtube videos of excited oil droplet propagation. Your lay understanding of these videos is not equivalent to the consensus of people who dedicate their entire lives to these topics.
> It's not constant. It varies by temperature.
It's worse than that. The relevant speed is (I think) the speed of surface waves, and surface waves in water are really quite complicated.
Also, pilot waves get interesting when more than one particle is involved. Two dancing droples do not act like two noninteracting quantum particles.
[edit: formatting]
Yeah, so when we will have vacuum cooled below 0K, it will confirm existence of ether.
Yes, I asserting very minority view in physics, but I'm able to back it with video of real experiment. It is not a hand waving.
Let be honest. The quick way to check understanding of something is to ask "why?" few times. People, who dedicates their entire lives to relativistic and/or quantum physics, are not able to answer even to single "why?". It's because of orthodox education.
However, they can downvote.
I think you may be rather confused about that video. I've watched what I think is the same video along with many other videos by the same experimenters (presented by the experimenters themselves!).
The waves in the water are not pilot waves. They kind-of-sort-of look like them. With one droplet, you get approximately the behavior that the pilot wave equation would predict, but the interesting bits are missing. If you observe the droplet twice (which you do in the video -- each frame is quite literally an observation), you get behavior that is completely inconsistent with an actual double-slit-experiment particle. If you add a second particle, the whole analogy breaks down: the pilot wave for two 2D particles is a function of five variables (time, x1, y1, x2, and y2), but the water wave is still just a function of three variables (time, x, and y).
But much more importantly, that video is a video of a bouncing water droplet and some surface waves. The droplet is a macroscopic droplet of water, and the waves are waves in a puddle of water. They obey the laws of fluid mechanics. If you grab the droplet while it's bouncing, it'll be gone and the water will still have waves. If you heat it up, it'll boil. If you turn the experiment upside down, everything will fall out and get things wet. Saying that the video proves that pilot waves exist is like saying that the experiments that play with "acoustic black holes" prove that black holes exist.
I think you will face great difficulties in convincing anyone that works in the topic area of this.
> Yes, I asserting very minority view in physics, but I'm able to back it with video of real experiment. It is not a hand waving.
It's clear you do not understand the propagation of acoustically excited droplets are a limited analogy, not a perfect model of QM/QFT. The people doing those experiments would not agree with your statements or characterizations.
> Let be honest. The quick way to check understanding of something is to ask "why?" few times. People, who dedicates their entire lives to relativistic and/or quantum physics, are not able to answer even to single "why?". It's because of orthodox education.
This is willful arrogant ignorance and a gross mischaracterization of the world of physicists. They absolutely address more than "a single why?". You have not put forth the effort necessary to understand the broadly accepted answer, let alone invalidate it.
Mathematics will not change, calculation results will not change, but understanding of processes will rise significantly, which may lead to new advances in physics.
And if you admit you do, you're at level of photon thrusters at best.