4 ms·

Thank you for your summary! It makes much more sense than the original article. It does leave me with a few questions, though. When you say the virtual particl

Thank you for your summary! It makes much more sense than the original article. It does leave me with a few questions, though. When you say the virtual particles are reflected, but quickly find another pair and annihilate each other, are they pairing wth normal photons? And because of the lack of anti-particles in our universe, isn't it more difficult for the photons to pair, meaning that if this experiment was scaled exponentially, the virtual photons would have an increasingly harder time pairing, becoming more abundant and living longer?

ars 15y ago
His explanation is partially wrong, which is why you have questions. There is no such thing as an anti-photon, and if there was, then a photon anti-photon pair would annihilate to produce - more photons! Time in the quantum world is not completely logical, essentially these virtual particles (they are not real particles!!) can not appear unless they already managed to annihilate and vanish (i.e. the order of operations is not one way). The reason these photons do manage to exist is that the experiment provided the energy necessary before the particles appeared. The "anti-photon" is not a real particle, and does not need to find another photon to annihilate with. It's more of a concept of energy, what it represents is missing energy, which needs to be provided in order for the partner (the regular photon to exist). The "missing/extra" energy pair can exist only for a short time, below the Heisenberg uncertainty limit. If, in some way, you disrupt the annihilation of missing and extra energy, the particles would not appear in the first place (that's that out of order business I was talking about). But since the experiment provided energy, the particles can appear, and then be split, and the "anti-photon" uses the energy of the experiment to not exist. You have probably heard of the momentum/location uncertainty pair - but there is another: it's time/energy. So the more exactly you know how much energy there is, the less you know about when it existed - that's why the particle can have this out of order behavior - time itself is not properly defined for it.

ars 15y ago

His explanation is partially wrong, which is why you have questions. There is no such thing as an anti-photon, and if there was, then a photon anti-photon pair would annihilate to produce - more photons! Time in the quantum world is not completely logical, essentially these virtual particles (they are not real particles!!) can not appear unless they already managed to annihilate and vanish (i.e. the order of operations is not one way). The reason these photons do manage to exist is that the experiment provided the energy necessary before the particles appeared. The "anti-photon" is not a real particle, and does not need to find another photon to annihilate with. It's more of a concept of energy, what it represents is missing energy, which needs to be provided in order for the partner (the regular photon to exist). The "missing/extra" energy pair can exist only for a short time, below the Heisenberg uncertainty limit. If, in some way, you disrupt the annihilation of missing and extra energy, the particles would not appear in the first place (that's that out of order business I was talking about). But since the experiment provided energy, the particles can appear, and then be split, and the "anti-photon" uses the energy of the experiment to not exist. You have probably heard of the momentum/location uncertainty pair - but there is another: it's time/energy. So the more exactly you know how much energy there is, the less you know about when it existed - that's why the particle can have this out of order behavior - time itself is not properly defined for it.