Francine, this was a really interesting article. I think that models like these can be very helpful aids to thinking. After all, Einstein and his contemporaries did lots of "thought experiments" without even needing any kind of physical analogue. They helped clarify the issues Einstein and the quantum physicists had with each other's theories.
The kinds of experiments in this article are modelling some feature of something they can't experiment with directly. If their analogy isn't valid then the results won't be. But still it may stimulate thought and perhaps eventually make it possible to contrive an indirect way of measuring something something we can't measure directly.
