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Oil droplets guided by pilot waves do not give rise to double-slit interference

quantamagazine.org

41–50 of 130 posts

Re: Oil droplets guided by pilot waves do not give rise to double-slit interference

#41
post #12
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more like seeing one boy actually impacts the gender of the second child, which is why the quantum experiment is so mind boggling. It doesn't seem to have any resemblance with classical physics and only makes sense in quantum physics.

That's exactly what the paradox states. Seeing one boy does affect the gender of the second child.

No it doesn't. In the 2/3 case, you're given information about the whole set, not just one member. Instead of "seeing one boy" affecting the gender of the other child, it's "seeing there are more than 0 boys" affecting the gender of one of the children.

Here's another example: If I flipped 100 coins, and told you there were 99 heads, what's the likelihood the other 1 was tails? The answer is 100/101, because there are 100 ways the one tail could happen, while only one way zero tails can happen. But if you're only told that the first 99 are heads, the answer is 1/2. You know the last flip has exactly the same odds as all the other ones -- the trials are independent. The difference is in one all the flips were included in the results (and the question isn't about any one specific flip), while in the other you had no information about the last flip (which the question was about).

Another way of looking at it: In the first example, the question was asking about the sum of 100 trials and you were given information about 99 of those 100 trials. You were given 99/100s of the information you need to answer the question. In the second example, the question was asking about the last trial and you were given information about 99 unrelated trials beforehand. You were given none of the information you need to answer the question.

Re: Oil droplets guided by pilot waves do not give rise to double-slit interference

#43
post #20
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say that the only thing that exists is the quantum wave function, as what basically this paper says (particles are epiphenomena). That is basically hard-line Everettianism e.g. many worlds. There are still problems. QFT does not explain gravity very well either. The paper claims "it's neutral on the interpretations" - it is not. You have the most senior research professor of physics at caltech admitting there…

> You have the most senior research professor of physics at caltech What is the ranking of seniority of research professors at Caltech? Are you implying that a research professor is somehow better than a “regular” professor?

>Are you implying that a research professor is somehow better than a “regular” professor?

Probably when it comes to understanding and forming opinions on cutting edge research. . .

Re: Oil droplets guided by pilot waves do not give rise to double-slit interference

#44
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't make sense to me that in order to get the probability of 2/3, you implicitly consider "a boy and a girl" to be different from "a girl and a boy". Somehow, you're saying that seeing the boy means you have ruled out the possibility of "a girl and a boy". But the ordering is in no way related to some arbitrary observation. It's just lexical.

Here's the math, I will break it down based on Boy/Girl and seen. For the first case here are the different combinations for two children based on sex (let's say left denotes older and right denotes younger to distinguish the difference between girl and a boy and boy and a girl.) B B B G G B G G These outcomes are each equally likely, but since we know that one has to be a boy we can eliminate the (G G) case leaving…

Suppose they are twins and therefore there is no older and younger. Does that change the probability from 2/3 in the first case?

Re: Oil droplets guided by pilot waves do not give rise to double-slit interference

#45
post #5

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't as strong as thought. This experiment is the equivalent of arguing that light isn't a particle because your tennis ball doesn't bounce off the wall the way you thought it would. When I saw the droplet experiment…

Do you know what the "basic math" said about electricity and magnetism before Faraday's experiments?

Re: Oil droplets guided by pilot waves do not give rise to double-slit interference

#46
post #3

All the paradoxes disappear if we use Quantum Field Theory instead of Quantum Mechanics. I would really like someone with deep knowledge on Quantum Theory to explain if something is wrong with a theory that otherwise makes a lot of sense to me. A good read on the topic is the paper "There are no particles, there are only fields" — https://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.4616.pdf

Surprisingly, physicists are very much aware of the field nature of all "entities" in the world, having invented QFT themselves. Even more surprisingly, popular journalistic explanations simplify things considerably, making it seem that the thoughts of physicists are much less refined than they really are. To complete the trifecta of surprises, in the refined thought process of us physicists, using QFT, many problems…

Regarding "in the refined thought process of us physicists...many problems and paradoxes...remain".

It seems to me that a true paradox in physics must mean a theory provides at least two different incompatible predictions for a given physical situation. Given the success of the Standard Model, that surprises me. Do you have an example?

Re: Oil droplets guided by pilot waves do not give rise to double-slit interference

#47
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the math, I will break it down based on Boy/Girl and seen. For the first case here are the different combinations for two children based on sex (let's say left denotes older and right denotes younger to distinguish the difference between girl and a boy and boy and a girl.) B B B G G B G G These outcomes are each equally likely, but since we know that one has to be a boy we can eliminate the (G G) case leaving…

Suppose they are twins and therefore there is no older and younger. Does that change the probability from 2/3 in the first case?

I guess this is one of a few place to answer mu.

One of the twins is still considered to be born first and therefore older :-)

Re: Oil droplets guided by pilot waves do not give rise to double-slit interference

#48
post #5

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't as strong as thought. This experiment is the equivalent of arguing that light isn't a particle because your tennis ball doesn't bounce off the wall the way you thought it would. When I saw the droplet experiment…

But didn't we (HN users) asked a lot for publishing of negative results?

HN users asked for results of experiments that "tried but failed to contradict the null-hypothesis", not "tested something not related to null hypothesis and claimed that it contradicts it". That's what I think the OP meant, don't know much about QM either.

Re: Oil droplets guided by pilot waves do not give rise to double-slit interference

#49
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the math, I will break it down based on Boy/Girl and seen. For the first case here are the different combinations for two children based on sex (let's say left denotes older and right denotes younger to distinguish the difference between girl and a boy and boy and a girl.) B B B G G B G G These outcomes are each equally likely, but since we know that one has to be a boy we can eliminate the (G G) case leaving…

Suppose they are twins and therefore there is no older and younger. Does that change the probability from 2/3 in the first case?

Ignoring the increased probability that twins are of the same gender, no. Regardless, the chance of having two children of different genders is twice that of having two boys. If you split the set into 'two boys, a boy and a girl, and two girls', you must accept that the 'a boy and a girl' case is twice as likely as the first and last options.

Re: Oil droplets guided by pilot waves do not give rise to double-slit interference

#50
post #5

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't as strong as thought. This experiment is the equivalent of arguing that light isn't a particle because your tennis ball doesn't bounce off the wall the way you thought it would. When I saw the droplet experiment…

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.

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.

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.

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