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MUCILAGINOUS OMNIVERSE | 2009 | performance Arising from underneath a bath of silicone oil, low frequency sound waves mobilize a pillow of air just above the liquid’s surface, preventing falling oil droplets from coalescing with the bath. As these palpitating spheroids bounce on the air-oil interface their repeated impact incites capillary waves that interlock with the waves of neighboring droplets. This close-range attractive force can result in the orbital motion of droplet pairs and clusters. During more stable modes of excitation, self-organizing geometric rafts emerge in accordance with the closest packing of spheres: the distance between droplets decreases with increasing acoustic frequency, leading to dense lattice formation. It was discovered in the early 2000s that these bouncing droplets offer macroscopic analogues of quantum behaviour, such as quantized orbital motion, quantum tunneling, and wave-particle duality. As described by Yves Couder, “the droplet moves due to its interaction with the distorted interface, this means that it is guided by a pilot wave that contains a path memory. Through this wave-mediated memory, the past as well as the environment determines the [droplet’s] present motion”.[A. Eddi, E. Sultan, J. Moukhtar, E. Fort, M. Rossi, Y. Couder, “Information stored in Faraday waves: the origin of path memory”, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Vol. 674, pp. 1 -31, Cambridge University Press, January 2011] img video  © 1998 - 2023 Domnitch Gelfand |
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