3 ms·
I'm not smart enough to have that kind of doubt: you really got me thinking! And you made me think of the wave/particle duality. Detection over this distance se
by the_other 8y ago
I'm not smart enough to have that kind of doubt: you really got me thinking! And you made me think of the wave/particle duality. Detection over this distance seems much more plausible with the light-as-waves model; the waves behaving like er... waves and our detection of them working more like radar/echo-location.
- ummonk 8y agoIt doesn’t make any difference - the probabilities would be the same. You can treat it as a bunch of photons (with the expected photon density that the sun emits) or as a light wave that collapses to a photon in the detector with probability given by the Born rule. The probability will work out the same.
- the_other 8y agoThat breaks my mental model of waves (which probably means my model needs improving). I imagined the probably of the wave reaching the detector was proportional to the energy of the original signal. Does that map directly to photons and probability? I suppose it must... woah.