Ever since Schrodinger, Planck, Bohr et al were bashing out the principles of the first quantum theory, there has been a significant disconnection between the everyday world of our busy macroscopic lives and the dualistic world of sub-atomic particles and probability waves. Pots and pans, trees and lumberjacks, cats and dogs...all macroscopic, "solid" and existing, it seems as an obvious reality, no duality, no wave-like mystery. Even the waves on the sea, are somehow tangible, the bobbing up and down of bulk water.

But, the sub-atomic world is different. We thought. It exists in an entirely otherworldly realm where a single particle is neither wave nor solid until it is observed, where electrons can interfere with each other even when they pass through one of two slits individually. Where particles can tunnel through barriers as if the barrier were not there. This world certainly impinges on the macroscopic world through microelectronics and other systems that rely on quantum phenomena for their operation.

However, there is a strong feeling that the real world is somehow separate from the quantum world. It's at the other end of the scale of the cosmological, where we perceive the vast times and distances between our pale blue dot and the space that were think of as "outer". There is new evidence though that just as the Earth is not somehow separate from the cosmos and we really are the dust of ancient stellar outbursts, so too, the quantum particles that seem to skip in and out of existence on a whim and are neither here nor there but nowhere or now here at the same time, are part of the macroscopic world.

According to research discussed in this month's Physics World, for the past eight years, two French researchers have been bouncing droplets around a vibrating oil bath and observing their unique behavior and this unique behavior, it turns out, is not quite unique, but provides what could be the first evidence that quantum behavior occurs at the macroscopic level.

It was French physicist Louis de Broglie, who, in 1926, described the duality of wave and particle at the quantum level, the idea of a wavicle being a nasty neologism no one really wanted anyone to have coined, but there it is. It was thought such an entity would be restricted to the sub-atomic, but then in 2005, Yves Couder and Emmanuel Fort demonstrated that oil droplets released on to the surface of a vibrating oil bath can bounce up and down and instead of becoming immersed in the liquid maintain their droplet state but generate a series of waves beneath them. The pair found that changing the amplitude of the vibrations could set the droplets surfing on the crest of the waves so that they could bounce them around the oil bath.

These wave-droplets - or "walkers" as the researchers called them - definitely hinted at wave-particle duality in the everyday world. The waves would not be manifest if the droplets were not the there and yet the droplets would not move without the waves, the droplet and the wave it creates are thus one and the same. Couder and Fort have apparently demonstrated the archetypal quantum phenomenon - interference in an analogue of Young’s double-slit experiment.

However, there are skeptics and one area in which the walkers are out of step with the idea of macroscopic quantum effects is in entanglement.

The team is yet to show how once coupled and then physically separated walkers can remain intricately linked through a quantum effect.

Fundamentally, the dimensions accessible to the walker system is limited to the surface of the oil bath and many physicists seem reluctant to accept that the oil bath is somehow displaying quantum behavior if it cannot make manifest this central phenomenon of the modern theory.

David Bradley blogs at http://www.sciencebase.com and tweets @sciencebase, he is author of the popular science book "Deceived Wisdom".