Escape From Shadow Physics

The Quest to End the Dark Ages of Quantum Theory

Adam Forrest Kay 2024 / Beaverton Library 530.12 Kay

Kay is not a physicist, and doesn't understand scaling. He works with hydrodynamic quantum analogs, millimeter scale droplets atop an air layer atop a vibrating fluid bath, which have analogies to de Broglie's 1927 pilot wave theory, which de Broglie abandoned after Wolfgang Pauli objected that the theory did not properly deal with inelastic scattering

Sorta kinda patched up by David Bohm in 1952, and pursued in fluid physicist Yves Couder's lab in 2005, but repeat runs of the experiment contradicted Couder’s initial results.

Hence, "Escape" is hundreds of pages about a bullshit analogy, at scales 20 orders of magnitude larger than actual quantum phenomena. Physicists explore actual quantum and subatomic behavior to very high precision; the Josephson effect (related to my master's thesis) binds frequency and voltage to incredible precision, and defines the standard volt. Fooling around with millimeter water droplets tells us nothing about 1e-18 meter electrons, much less the boson-like Cooper pairs that explain superconductors.

Sadly, this book gets high marks from the Wall Street Journal and other non-scientific book reviews. This could have very damaging effects on projects and products that exploit the "quantum weirdness" that superconducting macrosystems exhibit.