Bouncing oil droplets have analogies to quantum mechanics, and can act as universal Turing computers.

This is an automatic summary, original reduced by 79%.

A droplet bouncing and wandering across a liquid surface can produce waves that store the history of its chaotic motion.

Now Emmanuel Fort of the Institute of Industrial Physics and Chemistry and his colleagues have shown that, for a liquid drop bouncing along a path on the surface of a bath of the same liquid, chaos is no obstacle to time reversibility.

Fort and colleagues had previously used this setup to mimic phenomena in optics, acoustics, and quantum mechanics [1, 2]. In their latest experiments, using silicone oil as the liquid, they followed the drop's motion as it was driven by surface waves along a chaotic path.

The waves were produced by the impact of the drop but were fed with energy from a mechanical oscillator vibrating the bath.

Fort and colleagues could reverse the drop's trajectory by suddenly reversing the phase, or direction of motion, of the waves by reversing the mechanical oscillator, essentially making the waves go up when previously they had gone down.

In the team's experiments, as the drop bounces around, it alters the wave field by exciting a new ripple each time it hits the surface.

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