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To: Doctor Stochastic
Re:"The two slit experiment gives some strange behavior"

Guess I went to bed too soon to see your reply. I remember the two slit experiment because I puzzled over it for a long time, too. Was that Bell? The analysis I read that made the most sense was in a compendium of Nobel prize papers in the History of Physics. That book is back at the library, and the notes I made are on another hard drive in another computer. So from memory: The paper said in the final analysis the photons do not have to "communicate" with each other from a distance to achieve the results which are observed. The photons arriving at the far end follow a random distrubution. It is not necessary for the arriving photons to "know" what other photons have been doing earlier or later -- they end up in the expexted distribution, as expected.

Well, that analysis made sense when I read it. I guess we just don't know exactly what the individual photons are doing on their journey. But they don't have to "know" about each other.

I use analogies to understand this stuff sometimes, like the bank queue. The analogy is that the predictive/descriptive statistics are a model of the aggregate population of entities, not a description of the actual reality/behavior of an individual entity removed at random from the aggregate. It is a lot harder to make this distinction in QM, because of the wave behavior of the photon, etc, and the distinction is not always made when it should be.
145 posted on 03/29/2003 7:07:31 AM PST by AMDG&BVMH
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To: AMDG&BVMH
The problem (philosophical, not physical) is that in a bank queue, the statistics arises from the dispersion of a group of individuals. The photons seem to carry their dispersion along with themselves.
198 posted on 03/29/2003 8:43:10 PM PST by Doctor Stochastic (Vegetabilisch = chaotisch is der Charakter der Modernen. - Friedrich Schlegel)
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