4 ms·

"When it hits the walls it registers as a single point" is pretty vague and seems to me to be where you're kinda glossing over a lot of the not-just-a-wave comp

"When it hits the walls it registers as a single point" is pretty vague and seems to me to be where you're kinda glossing over a lot of the not-just-a-wave complexity. Im fairly certain you could make an experiment where one photon went through some apparatus and two specks of light appeared at the photo detector (with new wavelengths of course). What mechanism in your wave-only theory describes this split? Why do these waves sometime split or fuse and other times stay as single particles? The 'it stays as one particle cause it started as one particle' explanation would lead to a very monochromatic universe!

konschubert 6y ago
No, you can't do that with one photon.
- ithkuil 6y ago
  What you can do with one photon is to observe that it almost never appears in the screen in positions where geometry dictates there would be destructive interference of the photon was a wave. If you literally try one photon only once, well, you can't really talk about probabilities; whatever happened happened (possibly you witnessed an unlikely event). But if you repeat the experiment N times, even if you do it spaced by many miles and many days, and collect the data you'll notice that the measurements cluster in ways that are compatible with interference bands. If an actual physicist can tell me whether that I wrote above is fundamentally wrong, I'd be happy and have more questions
- xscott 6y ago
  If his apparatus was a "beta barium borate" crystal, isn't this exactly how entangled pairs of photons are created?
- greysphere 6y ago
  So, 'something' must be able to turn a photon of one wavelength into a photon of another wavelength, otherwise we'd only have 1 wavelength of light in our universe. Moreover, if we assume conservation of energy, changing a photon w/ wavelength A into B leaves over some energy C, that again, assuming some mechanism of changing energy into light, a new photon could be emitted. So which assumption is wrong? (1) Light comes in many different wavelengths (2) Conservation of energy (3) Non-light energy can be changed into light energy (4) Light color follows the photon model for the relation between energy and wavelength. (or just do a simple google search: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.03039 https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.03039 where it's sounds like it's been observed directly)

konschubert 6y ago

No, you can't do that with one photon.

ithkuil 6y ago
What you can do with one photon is to observe that it almost never appears in the screen in positions where geometry dictates there would be destructive interference of the photon was a wave. If you literally try one photon only once, well, you can't really talk about probabilities; whatever happened happened (possibly you witnessed an unlikely event). But if you repeat the experiment N times, even if you do it spaced by many miles and many days, and collect the data you'll notice that the measurements cluster in ways that are compatible with interference bands. If an actual physicist can tell me whether that I wrote above is fundamentally wrong, I'd be happy and have more questions
xscott 6y ago
If his apparatus was a "beta barium borate" crystal, isn't this exactly how entangled pairs of photons are created?
greysphere 6y ago
So, 'something' must be able to turn a photon of one wavelength into a photon of another wavelength, otherwise we'd only have 1 wavelength of light in our universe. Moreover, if we assume conservation of energy, changing a photon w/ wavelength A into B leaves over some energy C, that again, assuming some mechanism of changing energy into light, a new photon could be emitted. So which assumption is wrong? (1) Light comes in many different wavelengths (2) Conservation of energy (3) Non-light energy can be changed into light energy (4) Light color follows the photon model for the relation between energy and wavelength. (or just do a simple google search: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.03039 https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.03039 where it's sounds like it's been observed directly)