One of the things we did differently was we built a centrifuge and ran an electric current through the silver source to heat it. By varying the current and speed of the centrifuge we could vary the silver atom output. Our goal typically was to send a single atom through it at a time, but our apparatus liked to send clumps of atoms through. It had the advantage that we knew the velocity of the silver atoms and we could separate out the clumps on the output. Clumps deflected much less, but that made the output less pure.
You too can build your own Stern-Gerlach and double slit apparatuses at home : )
I don't remember the details like amps, temps, source velocity, etc. just that they were stable. We just tinkered with them until we got a reliable source. Once we had a reliable source of single atoms/wave packets < somewhat anyway : ) > we generally tried to invalidate Stern-Gerlach or get multiple results. For example, instead of stopping at the photographic plate (or phosphor screen we would run it through the double slit, with variations, to test our mathematically derived predictions. For some very odd reason our advisers didn't think we had accomplished anything unless we had the mathematical framework to back it up : )
Sadly and much to our dismay, we were unable to produce any new or unexpected results, which actually pleased our unimaginative advisers. What we were trying to do was determine velocity, position and spin concurrently, for at least a brief period of time. Like I said, everything is waves of nothing, with an emphasis on the nothing.
Thanks for the account of your experiment! I most enjoyed it. As to double-slit, I've never built one per se, but I've seen lots of wave interference patterns in other optical experiments. I have no doubt that light is(are?) waves. (By the way, if you shoot a laser through a thick piece of glass into a photo diode which feeds the input of an audio amp which drives a speaker, some most fascinating things can be heard! It's really just interference patterns, but you can hear them as you change the angle of the thick glass.)
As to Stern-Gerlach, doesn't that require an enormous vacuum? I'd never heard of the experiment before you mentioned it, but I've been searching google since then, and find that most sites speak only very abstractly of it. But from what I've gleaned, a diffusion type pump or something that gets to 10-6 Torr is needed. I'm assuming your whole apparatus was inside a vacuum chamber, on the centrifuge.
I guess you must have been detecting the silver atoms with photographic plate and must have done everything in a dark room?
As to light being a wave - I'm certain of that due to interference patterns. As to it being a particle, I'm not convinced. I realize that light does tend to arrive in quantum sizes, but I also know that in many cases it is generated in quantum sizes. For example, any fluorescent or chemically generated light will be due to an electron falling down a quantum number of level(s). What about incandescence? Do we actually know that it doesn't produce light in quantum sizes for its own reasons?
Furthermore, I'm not certain that our ways of detecting a single photon aren't applying their own quantization: If we were to play a low power continuous wave light beam on a photo-sensitive emitter in a photomultiplier tube, how do we know that the atom doesn't start ringing up like the glass in front of the loud voice singer, then finally, like the glass breaking, reach such a high energy state that it throws an electron, thereby quantizing it?
As a matter of fact, if electrons are quantum units, would it not be impossible to know whether the light was quantum or not as long as we're using electrons to convey that information? What if light were not quantum, how would we know it? Would we get an electron and a half off the first plate on the photomultiplier? :-)
Interestingly, some even claim to have demonstrated that super tiny antennas which are half a wavelength of visible light behave with light just like radio waves do with normal antennas.
As to all matter being waves, I'm not ready to accept that one yet. How does the Stern-Gerlach experiment prove that matter is waves? I would be most amused to see some photos of the photo plates from a good Stern-Gerlach experiment, if you know where I might find such a thing.
Thanks very much!
-Jesse