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.
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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