<story><title>Oil droplets guided by pilot waves do not give rise to double-slit interference</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/famous-experiment-dooms-pilot-wave-alternative-to-quantum-weirdness-20181011/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mehwoot</author><text>Why does this matter?  Does anybody seriously question whether the basic math can work?  So somebody found a nice parallel between pilot wave theory and another physical phenomenon, but then the parallel wasn&amp;#x27;t as strong as thought.  This experiment is the equivalent of arguing that light isn&amp;#x27;t a particle because your tennis ball doesn&amp;#x27;t bounce off the wall the way you thought it would.&lt;p&gt;When I saw the droplet experiments, I thought &amp;quot;that&amp;#x27;s cool, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t prove anything about pilot wave theory because the arguments are over much deeper things than what this is demonstrating&amp;quot;.  Debunking it is just as meaningless.  The people who actually know about this stuff are arguing over determinism and non-locality and what not.  I thought oil droplets are just a nice way to introduce people to the concept.&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I don&amp;#x27;t really know anything about any of this</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stupidcar</author><text>It matters because the theory in this case wasn’t that both light and tennis balls behave like a particle. It was that light behaves like a tennis ball. As such, demonstrating that tennis balls succeed or fail to display certain light-like behavior is certainly an important result.&lt;p&gt;So, the most controversial aspect of pilot wave theory is the idea that a classical system can reproduce some phenomena considered only to arise in a quantum one. The 2006 result was important because it appeared to definitively prove a classical system could do just that, and for one of the most famously “weird” quantum results. How accurately it correlated with a hypothetical pilot wave based quantum reality wasn’t really relevant. And if the original result was important, then the failure to reproduce it is also important.&lt;p&gt;More generally, scientists can argue about theory, mathematics and the “deep” stuff until the cows come home. But what actually advances science is experiment. It may not always be the most glamorous or exciting work (CERN notwithstanding). It can be an expensive, years-log slog to add a single negative data point against an idea a theoretician dreamt up in an afternoon, and which they’ll dismiss as irrelevant, or avoid by tweaking a single equation. But it’s, quite literally, the part of science that gets results.</text></comment>
<story><title>Oil droplets guided by pilot waves do not give rise to double-slit interference</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/famous-experiment-dooms-pilot-wave-alternative-to-quantum-weirdness-20181011/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mehwoot</author><text>Why does this matter?  Does anybody seriously question whether the basic math can work?  So somebody found a nice parallel between pilot wave theory and another physical phenomenon, but then the parallel wasn&amp;#x27;t as strong as thought.  This experiment is the equivalent of arguing that light isn&amp;#x27;t a particle because your tennis ball doesn&amp;#x27;t bounce off the wall the way you thought it would.&lt;p&gt;When I saw the droplet experiments, I thought &amp;quot;that&amp;#x27;s cool, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t prove anything about pilot wave theory because the arguments are over much deeper things than what this is demonstrating&amp;quot;.  Debunking it is just as meaningless.  The people who actually know about this stuff are arguing over determinism and non-locality and what not.  I thought oil droplets are just a nice way to introduce people to the concept.&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I don&amp;#x27;t really know anything about any of this</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mpweiher</author><text>Well, I think the opposite result would have been &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; interesting&amp;#x2F;surprising.  So I think it&amp;#x27;s a good experiment, and it&amp;#x27;s good to publish negative results.&lt;p&gt;The subhead seems a tad sensationalist.  If interference had been shown, it would have suggested strongly that this can happen at the smaller scale as well, and that it didn&amp;#x27;t is probably disappointing for those that hoped to show it in the analogy. Not sure how it &amp;quot;crushes&amp;quot; those theories.</text></comment>