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Comment by mehwoot | Hacker News Reader

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 experiments, I thought "that's cool, but it doesn't prove anything about pilot wave theory because the arguments are over much deeper things than what this is demonstrating". 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.

Disclaimer: I don't really know anything about any of this

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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.

One excercise that is fun to do: reduce the Schrodinger equation by splitting the real and complex parts, the figure out how to build a damped spring system that can support the wave. My interpretation of quantum mechanics is that everything is springs and dashpots in the end.

This is great, I think I'm going to explain it using your method from now on.

Edit: I love that there's a segment of people in the QM community approaching these "very serious" thought experiments like Schrodinger's Cat (as the classic example), instead using absurdism to produce equivalent but blatantly ridiculous results. Like the Surrealist reactionary art movement but with the often insane results QM produces. Sometimes I think string theorists need a group kind of like this too.

My favorite of these types of bizarro QM communities is that of the "holographic fractal" universe. Nassim Haramein[1] being one of the popular figures of this movement. If you're willing to sift through the mysticism, the r/holofractal subreddit has some interesting ideas to chew on during an otherwise dull lunch break.[2]

[1] https://resonance.is/about-haramein/

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/holofractal/

Well, I think the opposite result would have been very interesting/surprising. So I think it's a good experiment, and it's good to publish negative results.

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't is probably disappointing for those that hoped to show it in the analogy. Not sure how it "crushes" those theories.

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.

But still, someone had thought this question and experiment, if they published how it was done and the results others that have same question can look at it, decide to redo it but in a different way or not waste the time doing it again. And we have an answer for a question, I assume if the result was different then the reaction from OP would be different,

Maybe that's how we clickbaitify the null hypothesis and save science.

That's absolutely right. There's nothing surprising in this article, and it doesn't provide any new support to any theory.

So.you are essentially saying that that oil droplet on water analog cannot be treated as an analog computer (in every sense of the word) for pilot wave theory?

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

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