John Bush - Walking on water: from biolocomotion to quantum foundations

In this lecture John Bush will present seemingly disparate research topics which are in fact united by a common theme and underlaid by a common mathematical framework.

First there is the ingenuity of the natural world where living creatures use surface tension to support themselves on the water surface and propel themselves along it. Then there is a system discovered by Yves Couder only fifteen years ago, in which a small droplet bounces along the surface of a vibrating liquid bath, guided or 'piloted’ by its own wave field. Its ability to reproduce many features previously thought to be exclusive to quantum systems has launched the field of hydrodynamic quantum analogs, and motivated a critical revisitation of the philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics.

John Bush is a Professor of Applied Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics at MIT specialising in fluid dynamics.

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