Recovered: Plasma cavitation?

Beyond the boundaries of established science an avalanche of exotic ideas compete for our attention. Experts tell us that these ideas should not be permitted to take up the time of working scientists, and for the most part they are surely correct. But what about the gems in the rubble pile? By what ground-rules might we bring extraordinary new possibilities to light?

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allynh
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Re: Recovered: Plasma cavitation?

Unread post by allynh » Tue Feb 15, 2011 10:49 pm

I need to mention a video that ETSubmariner posted up in another thread that you simply have to watch.

Double layers . . . in water
http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum/phpB ... f=4&t=4220

This is the video.

Water, Energy, and Life: Fresh Views From the Water's Edge
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7jKL2-B0QA

The video is also available from the UWTV page, with the option to download an audio or video copy.

Water, Energy, and Life: Fresh Views From the Water's Edge
http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayeve ... ?rID=22222

Please download the video from either YouTube or UWTV, and watch it many times. It allows for modeling plasma behavior in a visible way. Using water and the micro beads that Pollack mentions, it should be possible to duplicate, at the particle level, the classic Birkeland terrella, and the Langmuir sheathe effect, and have it be visible to video. Also, it gives a way to model the aether and explain the results found in Dayton Miller's Ether-Drift Experiments.

Here is his website.

Pollack Laboratory
http://faculty.washington.edu/ghp/

There are links to a huge number of published papers, and there are books available from Amazon. This is gold. Thanks to ETSubmariner.

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Jarvamundo
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Re: Recovered: Plasma cavitation?

Unread post by Jarvamundo » Tue Feb 15, 2011 10:58 pm

yeah, hit that one out of the park ETS.

nice.

allynh
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Re: Recovered: Plasma cavitation?

Unread post by allynh » Wed Feb 16, 2011 1:15 pm

I've just harvested all of the pdf files that are on the Pollack site, forty so far, and this one caught my eye.

REVITALIZING SCIENCE IN A RISK-AVERSE CULTURE: REFLECTIONS ON THE SYNDROME AND PRESCRIPTIONS FOR ITS CURE
http://faculty.washington.edu/ghp/image ... cience.pdf
Abstract - This paper considers problems with the scientific culture and granting systems, the most important of which is an aversion to risk. Grant awards tend to be "safe" rather than bold. This discourages the fresh approaches that may bring important breakthroughs. The paper then suggests remedies that could restore the scientific enterprise to one that is friendlier to fresh thinking.

Key words: Grants, reviewer conservatism, risk taking, scientific culture, remedies

PREFACE

The thoughts contained herein arise in part from my experience as a frequent dissenter from prevailing orthodoxy, and in part from my experiences attending workshops convened to address problems with granting systems. Inevitably, such experiences generate ideas. In this case, they have brought modest insights into how granting systems might better serve transformative approaches that challenge the status quo. At present, such approaches have little chance of success. Yet they are the very ones that could bring spectacular advances.

Here, I outline the problems as I see them with today’s system of doing science, and their etiology. I also suggest remedies that could enhance scientists’ natural proclivity to seek the truth. Some of these thoughts have been passed on to the funding agencies in the context of campaigns designed to make the peer-review system more responsive to highly innovative, "out of the box" approaches. Others are new.
If you do nothing else, you need to read this paper. I was on the other side of this equation during my time at the NMDOT. I paid out the grants to the professors who then produced nothing for that money, and my bosses wanted it that way. The discussion starting on page three hits too close to home.
In short, the culture has deflected scientists from their singularly noble goal of pursuing truth. Just keep it safe, and get your funding. We have evolved into a culture of obedient sycophants, bowing politely to the high priests of orthodoxy.

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GaryN
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Re: Recovered: Plasma cavitation?

Unread post by GaryN » Wed Feb 16, 2011 2:32 pm

It goes further than just looking for grant money, allynh, IMO. Of course
people, even without malicious intent, will do what is neccessary
to feed their families, or have money for that new Lexus, it's
the nature of the beast.
My EU awakening adds more to my belief that those who control the
most powerful institutions in many disciplines have been intentionally
misleading us for centuries, millenia even.
The Universities themselves I believe, are set up to educate us in
a way which only serves their purpose. Certainly they must teach much
that is true, but they mislead on that 'kernel' of truth that makes
the difference between a potentially truly enlightened populace and
life long serfdom.
That is why I have always supported the Rebels, Bucky Fuller, Einstein, and
a good many more who refused to be told what to think.
Tesla suggested it might be possible to do away with a set of inefficient sparking connections known as commutators. This, his amused professor said, would be like building a perpetual motion machine! Not even Tesla could hope to achieve such a feat.
There were many rebels throughout America's history, but perhaps the most famous one was Thomas Edison. Edison only had 3 months of official schooling, then his mother made him stay home and she home schooled him.
In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. -Buckminster Fuller

kiwi
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Re: Recovered: Plasma cavitation?

Unread post by kiwi » Sat Feb 19, 2011 8:01 am

I've mentioned before that Electricity would not have moved forward until Franklin phrased everything in Fluid terms. The post is a good description of that.
Cheers allyhn,... I enjoyed the whole read of that doc on BF, and considered posting it up as it made a good fist of explaining the early thinking in a manner that is easy to understand, I had it in mind as it might aid others like myself who dont have a science background ....

I have a mate who's dad builds RFIon implant machines ( I remember it being said it was ion-cusp'd source, dont know what that means but remember it as the name sounded cool :D) I know it uses its beam to impregnate wafers, it can etch 200 lines with seperation between them all with it (the total 200 lines) being thinner that a human hair, its the magnets that are the key apparently , and they can control the depth of each line to very very tiny fractions (for computer chips)... speaking about EU to her she said that if I wanted to know anything about how the beam was accelerated and the plasma behaved its no prob to call and see him (I will be in Auckland next week), and I thought maybe regards Nereids idea about doing some experiments that there may be some data that can be got regards this devices functions that could be of use for that, .... (Im going to have a nosy anyway as I would like to see one of these gadgets working up close ... :roll:)

kiwi
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Re: Recovered: Plasma cavitation?

Unread post by kiwi » Sun Feb 20, 2011 1:49 pm

Hi allyhn :D this is from 2009 ..... (prob already in the archives but.....)

The study was led by Professor Steve Bramwell, of the London Centre for Nanotechnology. He said: “It is not often in the field of physics you get the chance to ask, ‘How do you measure something?’, and then go on to prove a theory unequivocally. This is a very important step to establish that magnetic charge can flow like electric charge.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/s ... 875326.ece

kiwi
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Re: Recovered: Plasma cavitation?

Unread post by kiwi » Sun Feb 20, 2011 1:55 pm

I have a mate who's dad builds RFIon implant machines
I will ask him to comment on P M Robilliard's critique of the WMAP data , these machines are the same so his opinion must be worth something! (unlike mine :D )

allynh
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Re: Recovered: Plasma cavitation?

Unread post by allynh » Sun Feb 20, 2011 10:37 pm

I have no idea how to work magnetricity into aether stuff, since it only appears at 1k. Here is a video I found while searching.

Mini-lecture: Professor Steve Bramwell on 'magnetricity'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh8FIK5Ik3Q
Then the link where some of the work is being done.

LCN Researchers Create Capacitor Effect for Magnetricity
http://www.london-nano.com/research-and ... gnetricity

I checked the Wiki page for "magnetricity" and they are protecting it from edit because someone has been trying to mention the term since it was published in Nature in 2009. Ha!

Magnetricity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetricity#cite_note-22

Notice the word "magnetricity" in Wiki takes you to a note only on the Magnetic monopoles page.

Here is one of the articles mentioned.

Magnetic Monopoles?
http://www.drillingsraum.com/magnetic_m ... opole.html

allynh
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Re: Recovered: Plasma cavitation?

Unread post by allynh » Mon May 07, 2012 10:32 am

The latest THUNDERBOLTS PROJECT Update May 6, 2012, mentioned the lecture, Robert Johnson: "Plasma Behavior in the Floating Water Bridge and Biology".

I haven't watched that video, but I did a search on Youtube for example videos and found this lecture. It's rather terrifying. HA!

Floating Water Bridge - Elmar Fuchs (SETI Talks)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1At3Gcd-No

One thing that I saw was when they changed the atmosphere, the water bridge changed. What that means is the electricity is powering the surface tension, which is a mix of water and atmospheric gas, creating the classic double layers.

At the 11 minute mark:

- In Helium and Argon, visible plasma discharges occurred, while with carbon dioxide the bridge failed to form. He doesn't say, but it is obvious that the Helium and Argon plasma discharge is made up of water vapor and the gas. i.e., a "dirty plasma".

The reason carbon dioxide caused the water bridge to heat up and fail was the inclusion of carbon changed the electrical conductivity of the surface. The carbon basically heated up, boiling the water.

At the 28 minute mark:

- they put in polymer beads to see how they are transported. The beads are in the surface only, spiraling around the bridge.

At the 33 minute mark:

- they look at the light properties of the surface and it is clear that the surface tension makes an actual pipe. They also mention Dr. Pollack at the 34:54 minute mark in finding these "exclusion zones".

Watch the video a few times, and put what he is saying in EU terms and Fluid mechanics. You will be as shocked as I was. HA!

This is Fuchs website.

Dr. Elmar C. Fuchs
The Floating Water Bridge
http://ecfuchs.com/?page=waterbridge

allynh
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Re: Recovered: Plasma cavitation?

Unread post by allynh » Fri Nov 09, 2012 2:25 pm

The universe is non-local and acausal. I love this stuff. HA!

Quantum Mystery of Light Revealed by New Experiment | Wave-Particle Duality | Space.com
http://www.space.com/18346-light-wave-p ... iment.html
Is light made of waves, or particles?

This fundamental question has dogged scientists for decades, because light seems to be both. However, until now, experiments have revealed light to act either like a particle, or a wave, but never the two at once.
wave-particle-duality.jpg
Now, for the first time, a new type of experiment has shown light behaving like both a particle and a wave simultaneously, providing a new dimension to the quandary that could help reveal the true nature of light, and of the whole quantum world.

The debate goes back at least as far as Isaac Newton, who advocated that light was made of particles, and James Clerk Maxwell, whose successful theory of electromagnetism, unifying the forces of electricity and magnetism into one, relied on a model of light as a wave. Then in 1905, Albert Einstein explained a phenomenon called the photoelectric effect using the idea that light was made of particles called photons (this discovery won him the Nobel Prize in physics). [What's That? Your Physics Questions Answered]

Ultimately, there's good reason to think that light is both a particle and a wave. In fact, the same seems to be true of all subatomic particles, including electrons and quarks and even the recently discovered Higgs boson-like particle. The idea is called wave-particle duality, and is a fundamental tenet of the theory of quantum mechanics.

Depending on which type of experiment is used, light, or any other type of particle, will behave like a particle or like a wave. So far, both aspects of light's nature haven't been observed at the same time.

But still, scientists have wondered, does light switch from being a particle to being a wave depending on the circumstance? Or is light always both a particle and a wave simultaneously?

Artist’s impression, inspired by the work of the artist Maurits Cornelis Escher, of the continuous morphing between particle- and wave-like behaviour of light.
CREDIT: Nicolas Brunner and Jamie Simmonds
Now, for the first time, researchers have devised a new type of measurement apparatus that can detect both particle and wave-like behavior at the same time. The device relies on a strange quantum effect called quantum nonlocality, a counter-intuitive notion that boils down to the idea that the same particle can exist in two locations at once.

"The measurement apparatus detected strong nonlocality, which certified that the photon behaved simultaneously as a wave and a particle in our experiment," physicist Alberto Peruzzo of England's University of Bristol said in a statement. "This represents a strong refutation of models in which the photon is either a wave or a particle."

Peruzzo is lead author of a paper describing the experiment published in the Nov. 2 issue of the journal Science.

The experiment further relies on another weird aspect of quantum mechanics — the idea of quantum entanglement. Two particles can become entangled so that actions performed on one particle affect the other. In this way, the researchers were able to allow the photons in the experiment to delay the choice of whether to be particles or waves.

MIT physicist Seth Lloyd, who was not involved in the project, called the experiment "audacious" in a related essay in Science, and said that while it allowed the photons to delay the choice of being particles or waves for only a few nanoseconds, "if one has access to quantum memory in which to store the entanglement, the decision could be put off until tomorrow (or for as long as the memory works reliably). So why decide now? Just let those quanta slide!"

This story was provided by LiveScience, a sister site to SPACE.com. You can follow LiveScience senior writer Clara Moskowitz on Twitter @ClaraMoskowitz. For more science news, follow LiveScience on twitter @livescience.
I really like the funky music they used in the videos. HA!

Single molecules in a quantum interference movie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCiOMQIRU7I

Single molecules in a quantum interference movie _ Recomposed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDx8tu-iX8U

This fits with the clip from _Through the Wormhole_ where they show the double slit experiment; the silicon drops are particles and waves.

Yves Couder . Explains Wave/Particle Duality via Silicon Droplets [Through the Wormhole]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9yWv5dqSKk

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phyllotaxis
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Re: Recovered: Plasma cavitation?

Unread post by phyllotaxis » Fri Nov 09, 2012 3:07 pm

Are you familiar with the (recently) late Gabriel LaFreniere?

Here's a link leading to his archived site- I'm sad to say much of its content seems to have disappeared since his passing...

allynh
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Re: Recovered: Plasma cavitation?

Unread post by allynh » Sat Nov 10, 2012 6:44 pm

The only Wave Structure of Matter(WSM) stuff I have is is by Milo Wolf. His books are still on my to-be-read pile. The LaFreniere site looks familiar but I never harvested his pages. The second page discussing the aether matches what I've been finding. I need to harvest the pages before they vanish, and put them with the Wolf.

AH! I found the folder on my drive where I was going to put the harvested pages in 27 August 2010. The folder is empty. That is deeply profound. HA!

Note: I found a mirror site for the pages.

http://www.rhythmodynamics.com/Gabriel_ ... matter.htm

allynh
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Re: Recovered: Plasma cavitation?

Unread post by allynh » Tue Mar 05, 2013 7:28 pm

This is an interesting example of what can be modeled using water. You may recognize some of the forms.

Knot Physics Experiment Uses Water To Create Amazing 'Knotted Vortex' Loop (VIDEO)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/0 ... 06702.html
By Lizzie Wade

After a century of studying their tangled mathematics, physicists can tie almost anything into knots, including their own shoelaces and invisible underwater whirlpools. At least, they can now thanks to a little help from a 3D printer and some inspiration from the animal kingdom.

Physicists had long believed that a vortex could be twisted into a knot, even though they'd never seen one in nature or the even in the lab. Determined to finally create a knotted vortex loop of their very own, physicists at the University of Chicago designed a wing that resembles a delicately twisted ribbon and brought it to life using a 3D printer.

After submerging their masterpiece in water and using electricity to create tiny bubbles around it, the researchers yanked the wing forward, leaving a similarly shaped vortex in its wake. Centripetal force drew the bubbles into the center of the vortex, revealing its otherwise invisible, knotted structure and allowing the scientists to see how it moved through the fluid—an idea they hit on while watching YouTube videos of dolphins playing with bubble rings.

By sweeping a sheet of laser light across the bubble-illuminated vortex and snapping pictures with a high-speed camera, they were able to create the first 3D animations of how these elusive knots behave, they report today in Nature Physics. It turns out that most of them elegantly unravel within a few hundred milliseconds, like the trefoil-knotted vortex in the video above.

Although this is the first time that scientists have seen knotted vortices for themselves, similar structures are thought to exist naturally in many places, including on the surface of the sun. Being able to custom-make and manipulate these flowing knots on command could lead to a much better understanding of the effects of their mysterious topology on different kinds of turbulence.'

See more videos.

ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.
Also on HuffPost:
supplementary_movie_6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd3EPbgHLSA

Creation and dynamics of knotted vortices
http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vao ... s2560.html

Knotted vortices in real fluids
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCA0VIExVhg

allynh
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Re: Recovered: Plasma cavitation?

Unread post by allynh » Tue Jul 01, 2014 1:15 pm

Have We Been Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Wrong This Whole Time?
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-new-quantum-reality
By Natalie Wolchover, Quanta Magazine
06.30.14 |
6:30 am |
Permalink

A droplet bouncing on the surface of a liquid has been found to exhibit many quantum-like properties, including double-slit interference, tunneling and energy quantization. John Bush

For nearly a century, “reality” has been a murky concept. The laws of quantum physics seem to suggest that particles spend much of their time in a ghostly state, lacking even basic properties such as a definite location and instead existing everywhere and nowhere at once. Only when a particle is measured does it suddenly materialize, appearing to pick its position as if by a roll of the dice.

This idea that nature is inherently probabilistic — that particles have no hard properties, only likelihoods, until they are observed — is directly implied by the standard equations of quantum mechanics. But now a set of surprising experiments with fluids has revived old skepticism about that worldview. The bizarre results are fueling interest in an almost forgotten version of quantum mechanics, one that never gave up the idea of a single, concrete reality.

The experiments involve an oil droplet that bounces along the surface of a liquid. The droplet gently sloshes the liquid with every bounce. At the same time, ripples from past bounces affect its course. The droplet’s interaction with its own ripples, which form what’s known as a pilot wave, causes it to exhibit behaviors previously thought to be peculiar to elementary particles — including behaviors seen as evidence that these particles are spread through space like waves, without any specific location, until they are measured.

Particles at the quantum scale seem to do things that human-scale objects do not do. They can tunnel through barriers, spontaneously arise or annihilate, and occupy discrete energy levels. This new body of research reveals that oil droplets, when guided by pilot waves, also exhibit these quantum-like features.

To some researchers, the experiments suggest that quantum objects are as definite as droplets, and that they too are guided by pilot waves — in this case, fluid-like undulations in space and time. These arguments have injected new life into a deterministic (as opposed to probabilistic) theory of the microscopic world first proposed, and rejected, at the birth of quantum mechanics.

“This is a classical system that exhibits behavior that people previously thought was exclusive to the quantum realm, and we can say why,” said John Bush, a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has led several recent bouncing-droplet experiments. “The more things we understand and can provide a physical rationale for, the more difficult it will be to defend the ‘quantum mechanics is magic’ perspective.”

Magical Measurements

The orthodox view of quantum mechanics, known as the “Copenhagen interpretation” after the home city of Danish physicist Niels Bohr, one of its architects, holds that particles play out all possible realities simultaneously. Each particle is represented by a “probability wave” weighting these various possibilities, and the wave collapses to a definite state only when the particle is measured. The equations of quantum mechanics do not address how a particle’s properties solidify at the moment of measurement, or how, at such moments, reality picks which form to take. But the calculations work. As Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at MIT, put it, “Quantum mechanics is just counterintuitive and we just have to suck it up.”

A classic experiment in quantum mechanics that seems to demonstrate the probabilistic nature of reality involves a beam of particles (such as electrons) propelled one by one toward a pair of slits in a screen. When no one keeps track of each electron’s trajectory, it seems to pass through both slits simultaneously. In time, the electron beam creates a wavelike interference pattern of bright and dark stripes on the other side of the screen. But when a detector is placed in front of one of the slits, its measurement causes the particles to lose their wavelike omnipresence, collapse into definite states, and travel through one slit or the other. The interference pattern vanishes. The great 20th-century physicist Richard Feynman said that this double-slit experiment “has in it the heart of quantum mechanics,” and “is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way.”

Some physicists now disagree. “Quantum mechanics is very successful; nobody’s claiming that it’s wrong,” said Paul Milewski, a professor of mathematics at the University of Bath in England who has devised computer models of bouncing-droplet dynamics. “What we believe is that there may be, in fact, some more fundamental reason why [quantum mechanics] looks the way it does.”

Riding Waves

The idea that pilot waves might explain the peculiarities of particles dates back to the early days of quantum mechanics. The French physicist Louis de Broglie presented the earliest version of pilot-wave theory at the 1927 Solvay Conference in Brussels, a famous gathering of the founders of the field. As de Broglie explained that day to Bohr, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and two dozen other celebrated physicists, pilot-wave theory made all the same predictions as the probabilistic formulation of quantum mechanics (which wouldn’t be referred to as the “Copenhagen” interpretation until the 1950s), but without the ghostliness or mysterious collapse.

The probabilistic version, championed by Bohr, involves a single equation that represents likely and unlikely locations of particles as peaks and troughs of a wave. Bohr interpreted this probability-wave equation as a complete definition of the particle. But de Broglie urged his colleagues to use two equations: one describing a real, physical wave, and another tying the trajectory of an actual, concrete particle to the variables in that wave equation, as if the particle interacts with and is propelled by the wave rather than being defined by it.

For example, consider the double-slit experiment. In de Broglie’s pilot-wave picture, each electron passes through just one of the two slits, but is influenced by a pilot wave that splits and travels through both slits. Like flotsam in a current, the particle is drawn to the places where the two wavefronts cooperate, and does not go where they cancel out.

De Broglie could not predict the exact place where an individual particle would end up — just like Bohr’s version of events, pilot-wave theory predicts only the statistical distribution of outcomes, or the bright and dark stripes — but the two men interpreted this shortcoming differently. Bohr claimed that particles don’t have definite trajectories; de Broglie argued that they do, but that we can’t measure each particle’s initial position well enough to deduce its exact path.

In principle, however, the pilot-wave theory is deterministic: The future evolves dynamically from the past, so that, if the exact state of all the particles in the universe were known at a given instant, their states at all future times could be calculated.

At the Solvay conference, Einstein objected to a probabilistic universe, quipping, “God does not play dice,” but he seemed ambivalent about de Broglie’s alternative. Bohr told Einstein to “stop telling God what to do,” and (for reasons that remain in dispute) he won the day. By 1932, when the Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann claimed to have proven that the probabilistic wave equation in quantum mechanics could have no “hidden variables” (that is, missing components, such as de Broglie’s particle with its well-defined trajectory), pilot-wave theory was so poorly regarded that most physicists believed von Neumann’s proof without even reading a translation.

*Picture*
At the fifth Solvay Conference, a 1927 meeting of the founders of quantum mechanics, Louis de Broglie (middle row, third from right) argued for a deterministic formulation of quantum mechanics called pilot-wave theory. But a probabilistic version of the theory championed by Niels Bohr (middle row, far right) won the day.

More than 30 years would pass before von Neumann’s proof was shown to be false, but by then the damage was done. The physicist David Bohm resurrected pilot-wave theory in a modified form in 1952, with Einstein’s encouragement, and made clear that it did work, but it never caught on. (The theory is also known as de Broglie-Bohm theory, or Bohmian mechanics.)

Later, the Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell went on to prove a seminal theorem that many physicists today misinterpret as rendering hidden variables impossible. But Bell supported pilot-wave theory. He was the one who pointed out the flaws in von Neumann’s original proof. And in 1986 he wrote that pilot-wave theory “seems to me so natural and simple, to resolve the wave-particle dilemma in such a clear and ordinary way, that it is a great mystery to me that it was so generally ignored.”

The neglect continues. A century down the line, the standard, probabilistic formulation of quantum mechanics has been combined with Einstein’s theory of special relativity and developed into the Standard Model, an elaborate and precise description of most of the particles and forces in the universe. Acclimating to the weirdness of quantum mechanics has become a physicists’ rite of passage. The old, deterministic alternative is not mentioned in most textbooks; most people in the field haven’t heard of it. Sheldon Goldstein, a professor of mathematics, physics and philosophy at Rutgers University and a supporter of pilot-wave theory, blames the “preposterous” neglect of the theory on “decades of indoctrination.” At this stage, Goldstein and several others noted, researchers risk their careers by questioning quantum orthodoxy.

A Quantum Drop

Now at last, pilot-wave theory may be experiencing a minor comeback — at least, among fluid dynamicists. “I wish that the people who were developing quantum mechanics at the beginning of last century had access to these experiments,” Milewski said. “Because then the whole history of quantum mechanics might be different.”

The experiments began a decade ago, when Yves Couder and colleagues at Paris Diderot University discovered that vibrating a silicon oil bath up and down at a particular frequency can induce a droplet to bounce along the surface. The droplet’s path, they found, was guided by the slanted contours of the liquid’s surface generated from the droplet’s own bounces — a mutual particle-wave interaction analogous to de Broglie’s pilot-wave concept.

In a groundbreaking experiment, the Paris researchers used the droplet setup to demonstrate single- and double-slit interference. They discovered that when a droplet bounces toward a pair of openings in a damlike barrier, it passes through only one slit or the other, while the pilot wave passes through both. Repeated trials show that the overlapping wavefronts of the pilot wave steer the droplets to certain places and never to locations in between — an apparent replication of the interference pattern in the quantum double-slit experiment that Feynman described as “impossible … to explain in any classical way.” And just as measuring the trajectories of particles seems to “collapse” their simultaneous realities, disturbing the pilot wave in the bouncing-droplet experiment destroys the interference pattern.

Droplets can also seem to “tunnel” through barriers, orbit each other in stable “bound states,” and exhibit properties analogous to quantum spin and electromagnetic attraction. When confined to circular areas called corrals, they form concentric rings analogous to the standing waves generated by electrons in quantum corrals. They even annihilate with subsurface bubbles, an effect reminiscent of the mutual destruction of matter and antimatter particles.

Pilot Wave
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-_IRbu1gAo

In each test, the droplet wends a chaotic path that, over time, builds up the same statistical distribution in the fluid system as that expected of particles at the quantum scale. But rather than resulting from indefiniteness or a lack of reality, these quantum-like effects are driven, according to the researchers, by “path memory.”Every bounce of the droplet leaves a mark in the form of ripples, and these ripples chaotically but deterministically influence the droplet’s future bounces and lead to quantum-like statistical outcomes. The more path memory a given fluid exhibits — that is, the less its ripples dissipate — the crisper and more quantum-like the statistics become. “Memory generates chaos, which we need to get the right probabilities,” Couder explained. “We see path memory clearly in our system. It doesn’t necessarily mean it exists in quantum objects, it just suggests it would be possible.”

The quantum statistics are apparent even when the droplets are subjected to external forces. In one recent test, Couder and his colleagues placed a magnet at the center of their oil bath and observed a magnetic ferrofluid droplet. Like an electron occupying fixed energy levels around a nucleus, the bouncing droplet adopted a discrete set of stable orbits around the magnet, each characterized by a set energy level and angular momentum. The “quantization” of these properties into discrete packets is usually understood as a defining feature of the quantum realm.

If space and time behave like a superfluid, or a fluid that experiences no dissipation at all, then path memory could conceivably give rise to the strange quantum phenomenon of entanglement — what Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance.” When two particles become entangled, a measurement of the state of one instantly affects that of the other. The entanglement holds even if the two particles are light-years apart.

In standard quantum mechanics, the effect is rationalized as the instantaneous collapse of the particles’ joint probability wave. But in the pilot-wave version of events, an interaction between two particles in a superfluid universe sets them on paths that stay correlated forever because the interaction permanently affects the contours of the superfluid. “As the particles move along, they feel the wave field generated by them in the past and all other particles in the past,” Bush explained. In other words, the ubiquity of the pilot wave “provides a mechanism for accounting for these nonlocal correlations.” Yet an experimental test of droplet entanglement remains a distant goal.

Subatomic Realities

Many of the fluid dynamicists involved in or familiar with the new research have become convinced that there is a classical, fluid explanation of quantum mechanics. “I think it’s all too much of a coincidence,” said Bush, who led a June workshop on the topic in Rio de Janeiro and is writing a review paper on the experiments for the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics.

Quantum physicists tend to consider the findings less significant. After all, the fluid research does not provide direct evidence that pilot waves propel particles at the quantum scale. And a surprising analogy between electrons and oil droplets does not yield new and better calculations. “Personally, I think it has little to do with quantum mechanics,” said Gerard ’t Hooft, a Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He believes quantum theory is incomplete but dislikes pilot-wave theory.

Many working quantum physicists question the value of rebuilding their highly successful Standard Model from scratch. “I think the experiments are very clever and mind-expanding,” said Frank Wilczek, a professor of physics at MIT and a Nobel laureate, “but they take you only a few steps along what would have to be a very long road, going from a hypothetical classical underlying theory to the successful use of quantum mechanics as we know it.”

“This really is a very striking and visible manifestation of the pilot-wave phenomenon,” Lloyd said. “It’s mind-blowing — but it’s not going to replace actual quantum mechanics anytime soon.”

In its current, immature state, the pilot-wave formulation of quantum mechanics only describes simple interactions between matter and electromagnetic fields, according toDavid Wallace, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford in England, and cannot even capture the physics of an ordinary light bulb. “It is not by itself capable of representing very much physics,” Wallace said. “In my own view, this is the most severe problem for the theory, though, to be fair, it remains an active research area.”

Pilot-wave theory has the reputation of being more cumbersome than standard quantum mechanics. Some researchers said that the theory has trouble dealing with identical particles, and that it becomes unwieldy when describing multiparticle interactions. They also claimed that it combines less elegantly with special relativity. But other specialists in quantum mechanics disagreed or said the approach is simply under-researched. It may just be a matter of effort to recast the predictions of quantum mechanics in the pilot-wave language, said Anthony Leggett, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a Nobel laureate. “Whether one thinks this is worth a lot of time and effort is a matter of personal taste,” he added. “Personally, I don’t.”

On the other hand, as Bohm argued in his 1952 paper, an alternative formulation of quantum mechanics might make the same predictions as the standard version at the quantum scale, but differ when it comes to smaller scales of nature. In the search for a unified theory of physics at all scales, “we could easily be kept on the wrong track for a long time by restricting ourselves to the usual interpretation of quantum theory,” Bohm wrote.

Some enthusiasts think the fluid approach could indeed be the key to resolving the long-standing conflict between quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of gravity, which clash at infinitesimal scales.

“The possibility exists that we can look for a unified theory of the Standard Model and gravity in terms of an underlying, superfluid substrate of reality,” said Ross Anderson, a computer scientist and mathematician at the University of Cambridge in England, and the co-author of a recent paper on the fluid-quantum analogy. In the future, Anderson and his collaborators plan to study the behavior of “rotons” (particle-like excitations) in superfluid helium as an even closer analog of this possible “superfluid model of reality.”

But at present, these connections with quantum gravity are speculative, and for young researchers, risky ideas. Bush, Couder and the other fluid dynamicists hope that their demonstrations of a growing number of quantum-like phenomena will make a deterministic, fluid picture of quantum mechanics increasingly convincing.

“With physicists it’s such a controversial thing, and people are pretty noncommittal at this stage,” Bush said. “We’re just forging ahead, and time will tell. The truth wins out in the end.”
Here's the video from _Through the Wormhole_.

Yves Couder . Explains Wave/Particle Duality via Silicon Droplets [Through the Wormhole]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9yWv5dqSKk

Why bouncing droplets are a pretty good model of quantum mechanics
http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.4356

seasmith
Posts: 2815
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2008 6:59 pm

Re: Recovered: Plasma cavitation?

Unread post by seasmith » Tue Jul 01, 2014 2:25 pm

~

CharlesChandler and JeffreyW, this old thread would be quite relevant to your works, if you've not already read it.
Especially the early pages with Marklund and Alfven.


cheers and a great 4th of july
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