Can fluid dynamics offer insights into quantum mechanics?
In the first decades of the 20th century, physicists hotly debated how to make sense of the strange phenomena of quantum mechanics, such as the tendency of subatomic particles to behave like both particles and waves. One early theory, called pilot-wave theory, proposed that moving particles are borne along on some type of quantum wave, like driftwood on the tide. But this theory ultimately gave way to the so-called Copenhagen interpretation, which gets rid of the carrier wave, but with it the intuitive notion that a moving particle follows a definite path through space.Recently, Yves Couder, a physicist at Université Paris Diderot, has conducted a series of experiments in which millimeter-scale fluid droplets, bouncing up and down on a vibrated fluid bath, are guided by the waves that they themselves produce. In many respects, the droplets behave like quantum particles, and in a recent commentary in the Proceedings of the...