Friday, December 28, 2012

Silicone Droplets on a Vibrating Sheet and Wave-Particle Duality

This video from Through the Wormhole, a series narrated by Morgan Freeman that used to air on the Science Channel in the U.S. offers an interesting analogy at the visible level to the quantum property of wave-particle duality. (N.B. The video's commentary is a bit over blown, and it is important to understand that, no matter how much we wish to be able to compare phenomena we know exist, due to repeated experiment, with ones we can easily see and grasp in everyday life, that is something of a fool's errand.  The forces that operate at the level of the very small are not ones anyone intuitively understands. You cannot intuitively understand it because, strictly speaking, there is no macro scale paradigm. That doesn't mean metaphors are useless -- they can be very valuable -- but we need to keep in mind they're metaphors.) Link via the tumblr Fuck Yeah Fluid Dynamics.

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