Mesmerizing. These little drops of silicone oil can “walk” and bounce across a vibrating bath of the same fluid, rather than sinking down and becoming part of the bath. The vibrations in the fluid allow the droplets to be borne across the surface by the waves produced when they collide. In short, they seem to walk–or float–across the fluid.
The droplets exhibit behavior that seems quantum in nature, and researchers think studying them will help shed light on something called called pilot-wave dynamics, a quantum system that describes microscopic particles moving with accompanying waves.
See it again:
These videos come from a study describing the droplets from the Technicla University of Denmark and MIT, recently published in the journal Physics of Fluid.