(ISNS) -- After a droplet falls onto a vat of vibrating liquid, what it does next could help solve fundamental mysteries in quantum physics. Now, scientists have mapped out the behavior of such drops to more detail than ever before, discovering new ways in which they can move.
If a vat of fluid throbs with too little force, the droplet falling onto it will merely disappear into the liquid. With just the right amount of force, however, the drop will bounce in place or even walk across the surface of the fluid. It can also behave even more unusually. Depending on how the liquid is shaken, it might regularly switch the sizes of its jumps, or zigzag about in unpredictable ways.
Increasingly, scientists find the way these walking droplets behave uncannily mimics strange effects previously only seen on a microscopic level in the quantum realm, where objects can apparently exist in two or more places at the same time or spin in two opposite directions simultaneously.
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