Thought this was very cool *promote

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Wednesday, November 2nd, 2016 12:01pm PDT - promote requested by original submitter eric3579.

Super Mario Bros!

Not in a position to make any judgement about its validity, but it certainly is an interesting idea.

Looked into ordering some to do the droplets thing myself, and you can get 16oz on Amazon for about $24. According to some comments, it's good for lubricating treadmills. And silencers.

I hate quantum mechanics and the absurd implications that extrapolate from it. I always believed that one day we would look back and laugh at how wrong it was. Turns out a more reasonable competing theory has been there all along. Why was I not taught this in school.

I get that it's just another theory and that quantum mechanics can't be judged based on intuition that comes from our interaction with the macro world. Still...fuck quantum mechanics.

*quality

kulpims cannot award a quality point for this post because kulpims does not have enough Power Points - ignoring quality request by kulpims. (You can always purchase more Power Points.)

To be fair, you were taught this in school if you were taught wave particle duality and the double slit experiment. Look at this. Now imagine a particle bouncing along in very small steps (quantum leaps if you will), and the direction it goes depends on the strength and orientation of the wave where it lands. You may never have been told to think about it like that, but that's what makes physics so amazing that sometimes all it takes is for someone to think about it slightly differently. The information was there all along, but who would imagine the 'particle' bit of an electron interacting with the 'wave' bit - the electron interacts with itself?

I absolutely love it, it's amazing, and simple and beautiful. It may provide insights into new ways we can model quantum behaviour, it might open up new questions to ask.

There's things I'd like to know. First, if the standing waves generated at each step in the droplet's progression interact with each other, the droplet is reacting according to waves it made in the past - what implications does that have for the notion of real particles in a spacetime continuum? For the double slits experiment to work in that model - in the ball on a rubber sheet sense - the sheet would have to stay warped to some extent after the ball had passed. In the quantum sense of the real double slits experiment, we would say it IS a wave, passes through both slits and appears according to statistical probability (the diffraction pattern).

Presumably several droplets released along the same path would go on to take a different route through the slits, to create a diffraction pattern as it must. Perhaps because of fluctuations in the temperature or density of the water at different locations? Is that a limitation of the model or an indicator about the nature of the fabric of spacetime? Perhaps even due to quantum fluctuations in the water particles - the water is never the same twice even if its perfectly still each time - which would potentially mean we're cyclically using quantum mechanics to explain quantum mechanics and we actually haven't explained very much.

The philosophy bit: But this reaches to the heart of the issue with quantum mechanics and perhaps science in general. How accurately can we model reality? The reality is beyond our ability to see, so we can only recreate simpler versions that are always wrong in some way... our idea of what happens - our models - can never be 100% because only a particle in spacetime can perfectly represent a particle in spacetime.

Scientific results and definitions are always defined with limits - "it works like this, within these confines, under these conditions, with these assumptions." There are always error margins. We are always only ever communicating an idea between different consciousnesses, and that idea will never be as true to life as life itself.

Sorry for the wall of text, it's a great and provocative experiment.

Smarter Every Day does an interesting sister piece

So you would prefer a totally deterministic universe?

If there's no true randomness in the universe, then EVERYTHING is literally pre-ordained. The universe is just a massive rube goldberg machine that we all unwittingly play our part in. Everything, from the formation of galaxies to what you decided to have for breakfast, is simply a result of an absurdly complicated machine playing out its inevitable ending.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that this is the implication of such a universe, unless you want to include some supernatural force (god, souls, etc.)

Smarter Every Day: The Walking Water Mystery has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579 on that post.