I was watching a program on the tube about rogue waves at sea. Mariners have reported these things for years, but scientists had denied their existence because they didn't fit the linear wave models. Basically, in a storm with seas running at 40 feet a wave of 100 ft height would sometimes appear. The linear wave models suggested you might see one of these every 10,000 years. You just couldn't get the energy into the wave. Well, one day an oil platform was being buffeted by forty foot waves when suddenly a 100 foot wave smashed into it. The platform had a device to record wave heights. All of a sudden there was incontrovertible proof. Now they had to explain these things. Well, it appeared that if a sea was running contrary to a strong current such waves could occur. Case closed or so they thought. Then two cruise ships in the Southern Ocean were subjected to such waves on successive days. One was nearly sunk. No strong current there. Well, researchers had found that Schrodinger's non linear wave equation predicted such behavior. When the profile from the oil platform wave was compared to the theoretical Quantum results, it was an exact match. Quantum Mechanics provided a mechanism for the large energy to become focused in such a wave. Subsequent satellite radar studies have detected these waves in the World's Oceans. They are finite in extent, appear for a while, and then disappear.
I suspect we're going to be hearing a lot more about this. It would appear that systems of energy flow having waves could exhibit this behavior. An obvious candidate is the atmosphere. Many atmospheric phenomena such as wind gusts, micro bursts, thunderstorms, tornadoes, and maybe even ball lightning may get going thanks to this process. What this does is introduce an element of randomness into processes that we thought were predictable.
This brings me to the following observation. Scientists discount human observation, believing it to be unreliable. Unless they can build a machine to measure the phenomenon it just doesn't exist. In many cases human observation is all that exists. The above example shows the limitations of such an attitude. Denying the existence of rogue waves has probably cost many lives, not to mention the loss of many ships, as steps were not taken to design ships to survive such waves. One wonders what other macroscopic phenomena the existence of which is either denied or poorly understood may be influenced by Quantum Mechanics.