Question about results of double slit experiment

[Paddy_Walker]

Light was one of many things Thomas got wrong. He thought it was instantaneous:

newadvent.org/summa/1067.htm (I, 67, 2)

His sentence “For if light were a body, it would follow that whenever the air is darkened by the absence of the luminary, the body of light would be corrupted” is reminiscent of this April Fool’s paper about “darkons”:

wearcam.org/theory_of_darkness.html

But light is instantaneous, its just that the distances are great so it takes a little time to cover them.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

Linus,
I am sure you have a vast supply of Aquinas’ thoughts stored in your neurons, which you use effectively when engaged in philosophical and/or theological arguments and I for one would never challenge you in those areas of knowledge. And if Aquinas made the statement “anyone who thinks they can " see " a single photon and to determine its causality is dreaming”: he would be correct because the only thing he had to see with was his own eye. And this from Wikipedia: "Although the retina can respond to a single photon, the neural filters only allow a signal to pass to the brain to trigger a conscious response when at least about five to nine arrive within less than 100 ms. If we could consciously see single photons we would experience too much visual “noise” in very low light, so this filter is a necessary adaptation, not a weakness".

On the other hand, immersing yourself in 13th century knowledge may have hampered your ability to dream, especially about single photons, something Aquinas could also not dream about. However there are dreamers that dream about “seeing” single photons and have made their dreams come true. There are ways the dreamers have developed that allow us to "see’ a single photon

youtube.com/watch?v=GzbKb59my3U

Yppop

.

What I was getting at is the causal extrapolations popular " cosmologists " make about these expiments. Many of these have concluded that this shows matter creating itself. My response to that is that only God can create anything, which is demonstrated by Thomas. So if photons actually are appearing without any physical causality, it is God who is doing the creating, it is not a case of matter creating itself.

By the way, I am not alone in thinking that modern physicists have gone too far. Many of their own collegues have spoken out quite voceferously on the subject. See Bankrupting Physics by Alexander Unzicker and Sheilla Jones.
Linus2nd

 

[Linusthe2nd]

Inocente said:

" Light was one of many things Thomas got wrong. He thought it was instantaneous:

newadvent.org/summa/1067.htm (I, 67, 2)

His sentence “For if light were a body, it would follow that whenever the air is darkened by the absence of the luminary, the body of light would be corrupted” is reminiscent of this April Fool’s paper about “darkons”: "

Gee, Aquinas had a lot of good company because until the early 20th century almost everyone thought light was instantaeous. That would include some of your scientific heroes.

I loved your final thought. Once again you are exposing your prejudices.

And as Paddy Walker pointed out. light is instaneous at its source.Perhaps before you intimate that somone is " backward " in their thinking, you should consider that .

When I saw this on New Advent I naturally thought of you.
strangenotions.com/gods-philosophers/
Linus2nd

 

[inocente]

But light is instantaneous, its just that the distances are great so it takes a little time to cover them.

Sorry, but no, instantaneous would mean light having infinite speed.

If you look at Thomas’ logic, he is not arguing that light is very fast. Instead he thinks light doesn’t pass through intervening space. It would mean that light from the most distant galaxies would reach your eye in the same instant it left them.

 

[inocente]

Gee, Aquinas had a lot of good company because until the early 20th century almost everyone thought light was instantaeous. That would include some of your scientific heroes.

I loved your final thought. Once again you are exposing your prejudices.

And as Paddy Walker pointed out. light is instaneous at its source.Perhaps before you intimate that somone is " backward " in their thinking, you should consider that .

Yikes. No, the speed of light is never infinite, not ever.

Empedocles, 450 BC, argued light wasn’t instantaneous, so did 13th century Roger Bacon. The speed was first measured successfully in 1676. Newton knew it wasn’t instantaneous.

This stuff is on Wikipedia, you could at least try doing a bit of research. As for " backward ", need I remind you of one of the other things Thomas got wrong:

As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence; - newadvent.org/summa/1092.htm (ST I, 92, 1)

There is a very simple rule which most of us learned at school - humans get things wrong, only God is perfect.

Perhaps you were off that day . So let’s say it again: Thomas was human, he is not God.

 

[Paddy_Walker]

Sorry, but no, instantaneous would mean light having infinite speed.

If you look at Thomas’ logic, he is not arguing that light is very fast. Instead he thinks light doesn’t pass through intervening space. It would mean that light from the most distant galaxies would reach your eye in the same instant it left them.

Thats exactly it, almost, according to Paddy’s theory of everything. Except that the speed of light is not infinite.
Think about it. Light, photons, travel like waves but not exactly. Waves need something to propagate through. They cannot travel through absolutely nothing, but they can travel through space.
So what is it that these waves propagate through or along? To understand, you can imagine a piece of absolutely non-elastic string stretched tightly from one particle on the sun to every particle on one hemisphere of the earths surface simultaneously. This string is the something that photon waves propagate along. So when the particle on the sun vibrates with enough energy to emit a photon the string connecting to all the particles on the earths surface also vibrates the particles on earth at the very same instantaneous time. This means that theoretically a photon emitted from the sun arrives on earth instantly but because of the distance between them the photon wave actually takes some time to reach earth.
If there was no connection between the sun and earth for the photon wave to move along then light could never reach us. And this something that connects us is not elastic, it has no physical properties that we can recognize. In theory the photon travels distances instantly but because of distance there is a delay before the particle on earth in turn emits a photon to the observer.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

Yikes. No, the speed of light is never infinite, not ever.

As usual you did not read carefully enouth. I never said that the speed of light was infinite. But if you walk over to your light switch and turn on the light, you will see that as soon as the circuit is energized the light comes on instantaneoulsly. Its a Law of Physics. As soon as the photons are kicked out of the nuclii, you have light! But of course it takes time for the light to reach the observer. That is obvious. Next time don’t jump to conclusions.

Empedocles, 450 BC, argued light wasn’t instantaneous, so did 13th century Roger Bacon. The speed was first measured successfully in 1676. Newton knew it wasn’t instantaneous.

This stuff is on Wikipedia, you could at least try doing a bit of research. As for " backward ", need I remind you of one of the other things Thomas got wrong:

As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence; - newadvent.org/summa/1092.htm (ST I, 92, 1)

There is a very simple rule which most of us learned at school - humans get things wrong, only God is perfect.

Perhaps you were off that day . So let’s say it again: Thomas was human, he is not God.

And I responded to that. Yes, Thomas was wrong. There, I said it again. I’m waiting for the day when you agree with me about something .

Linus2nd

 

[Aloysium]

You need to think that out. Ask yourself what do you see if not light? And if light is photons, what do you see if not photons?

So draw me a picture of a photon.

Photons causes chemical reactions in the receptor cells, the rods and cones in the retina.

I see the monitor; I will never be able to see a photon the way I see the monitor which produces photons.

I taste them, the way I taste sugar, consuming both in the process.

 

[yppop]

What I was getting at is the causal extrapolations popular " cosmologists " make about these expiments. Many of these have concluded that this shows matter creating itself. My response to that is that only God can create anything, which is demonstrated by Thomas. So if photons actually are appearing without any physical causality, it is God who is doing the creating, it is not a case of matter creating itself.

By the way, I am not alone in thinking that modern physicists have gone too far. Many of their own collegues have spoken out quite voceferously on the subject. See Bankrupting Physics by Alexander Unzicker and Sheilla Jones.
Linus2nd

Linus,
I agree with both statements. For example, in regard to the state of modern physics, here is what I wrote in post 823 of the thread, “Could the Universe Have Created Itself?” :

…The articles illustrate the speculative state of theoretical physics that has for the last 60 years been slogging around in mathematical morass that can only end in a philosophical cul-de-sac. The boys arrived at that end by taking two wrong forks in the scientific road: the first happened 24 centuries ago when Aristotle ignored Zeno’s analysis of motion and opted for continuous space as the background for objective reality. The second happened 3-centuries ago when Newton invented calculus to deal with continuous space then applied abstraction to explain objective reality with mathematical equations. The philosophical cul-de-sac consists of the effort to explain everything with a single equation ( the TOE Lagrangian) in order to combine the big and the small, relativity and quantum mechanics, gravity and the quantum forces. IMO science will eventually have to assume that space is discrete and not continuous and will have to explain objective reality with algorithms rather than equations. …

Yppop

 

[inocente]

Thats exactly it, almost, according to Paddy’s theory of everything. Except that the speed of light is not infinite.
Think about it. Light, photons, travel like waves but not exactly. Waves need something to propagate through. They cannot travel through absolutely nothing, but they can travel through space.
So what is it that these waves propagate through or along? To understand, you can imagine a piece of absolutely non-elastic string stretched tightly from one particle on the sun to every particle on one hemisphere of the earths surface simultaneously. This string is the something that photon waves propagate along. So when the particle on the sun vibrates with enough energy to emit a photon the string connecting to all the particles on the earths surface also vibrates the particles on earth at the very same instantaneous time. This means that theoretically a photon emitted from the sun arrives on earth instantly but because of the distance between them the photon wave actually takes some time to reach earth.
If there was no connection between the sun and earth for the photon wave to move along then light could never reach us. And this something that connects us is not elastic, it has no physical properties that we can recognize. In theory the photon travels distances instantly but because of distance there is a delay before the particle on earth in turn emits a photon to the observer.

Not sure if you’re being serious. Does your sig have anything to do with your theory?

 

[inocente]

As usual you did not read carefully enouth. I never said that the speed of light was infinite. But if you walk over to your light switch and turn on the light, you will see that as soon as the circuit is energized the light comes on instantaneoulsly. Its a Law of Physics. As soon as the photons are kicked out of the -]nuclii/-], you have light! But of course it takes time for the light to reach the observer. That is obvious. Next time don’t jump to conclusions.

Yikes. No, what happens is first, the electric current moves round the circuit. Second, it heats up the filament which begins to glow red. Third the filament glows white. These three things happen faster than you can see but they are far from instantaneous. - youtube.com/watch?v=YnMP1Uj2nz0

Just as you don’t notice the bulb flashing at the rate of the mains alternating current: youtube.com/watch?v=ZX_kXT-OLxU

In much the same way, a cinema film consists of stationary images with are displayed one after the other so fast that you don’t notice any stuttering.

Thomas got it dead wrong. But he didn’t have high speed cameras. You do. Thomas had an excuse for getting it wrong. You don’t.

And look up where photons come from. Not from nuclei.

And I responded to that. Yes, Thomas was wrong. There, I said it again. I’m waiting for the day when you agree with me about something .

Agreed. And if Thomas is wrong about things for which we have evidence, it doesn’t exactly add to his credibility.

 

[hu324b]

What the experiment suggests is when observed the photons act as a particle when not observed it acts as a wave and it is assumed all matter acts this way .So does anything really exist unless its observed.?

 

[inocente]

So draw me a picture of a photon.

Photons causes chemical reactions in the receptor cells, the rods and cones in the retina.

I see the monitor; I will never be able to see a photon the way I see the monitor which produces photons.

I taste them, the way I taste sugar, consuming both in the process.

You see light. Light is what you see. Every time you see, you see photons. You see photons every time you see. Sorry you lost me completely.

 

[Paddy_Walker]

Not sure if you’re being serious. Does your sig have anything to do with your theory?

Yes, I’m being serious, and sadly my sig didn’t have anything to do with it. I found confirmation of Paddy’s theory here.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

Yikes. No, what happens is first, the electric current moves round the circuit. Second, it heats up the filament which begins to glow red. Third the filament glows white. These three things happen faster than you can see but they are far from instantaneous. - youtube.com/watch?v=YnMP1Uj2nz0

Just as you don’t notice the bulb flashing at the rate of the mains alternating current: youtube.com/watch?v=ZX_kXT-OLxU

In much the same way, a cinema film consists of stationary images with are displayed one after the other so fast that you don’t notice any stuttering.

Thomas got it dead wrong. But he didn’t have high speed cameras. You do. Thomas had an excuse for getting it wrong. You don’t.

And look up where photons come from. Not from nuclei.

Agreed. And if Thomas is wrong about things for which we have evidence, it doesn’t exactly add to his credibility.

Yikes, I’ve never seen such an evasion and abandonment of reason. The bulb lights the second the filiment is excited. You can quibble if you want but that is instantaneous at the moment all the necessary conditions are meant for the propagation of light.

:banghead::banghead::banghead:

Now let me get back to fixing my Nephews Crown Vic. You would think, at my age, I would be relieved of the necessity to play mechanic. After three days I figured it out though. Time to feed the cattle - audios amigo.

Linus2nd

 

[Aloysium]

You see light. Light is what you see. Every time you see, you see photons. You see photons every time you see. Sorry you lost me completely.

“Seeing” can mean different things. Ultimately we are talking about a cognitive event based on vision.

One sees light, one sees the monitor, one sees words: perceptions come organized as components of thought. The same environment, same “sensory (name removed by moderator)ut”, different sorts of experiences based on where one directs one’s attention/thinking/focus.

If one says one sees photons, one is bringing into the experience, models and concepts that they have learned.

On the monitor screen one sees brightness, colours, lines. If someone sees photons, they are simply placing a label on the experience and drifting off into thought. All these very likely, given the advancement of science, will be superseded by other models and concepts.

You say you see photons. What you are doing is giving a scientific explanation to the experience. One of the difficulties I have with science today is its dependence on extensions of sight. Vision tends to feel the world at a distance, without the intimacy of touch, taste or smell, even hearing. This skews the understanding of the world in a direction of detachment.

I like the idea of tasting photons because it returns the focus to how it is that we connect to the world.
To speak of “seeing photons” to me sounds simply like an intellectual exercise.
Introducing a different metaphor makes the visual world and the real world to which it connects, feel more immediate, more alive, more real, perhaps even more scary. I am tasting, touching the light bouncing off things, and it makes me more interested in what is actually out there.

There are mathematical descriptions that have emerged from investigations through the use of electronic extensions of our visual sense. However, visual models fail here; we will never “see” photons, as I do not think they can be accurately described using that form of understanding.

Sorry if I have not clarified what I mean. I am not actually as confused as I may sound.

 

[john330]

What the experiment suggests is when observed the photons act as a particle when not observed it acts as a wave and it is assumed all matter acts this way .So does anything really exist unless its observed.?

Um, yes, sort of. I had read articles on the experiment that seemed to imply that the act of observation has some magical effect on the photon, causing it to collapse from a wave to a particle. But this is not actually what quantum mechanics thinks happens. The screen always records a single photon hitting it, but the photons hit the screen in a wave refraction pattern. This leads them to guess that the photon had been behaving as a wave would behave while traveling between the light source and the screen. I think Niels Bohr hypothesized the probability wave, which is the idea that the photon behaves as a wave while it travels through space, all the while it remains a photon. This is called wave-particle duality. The photon may show up on the screen at any random point, based upon the function of the wave…therefore the photon itself may be present at any point along the wave front. It is unpredictable, but there is greater probability of the photon hitting the screen in areas where there is less wave refraction. When they attempt to observe the particle, they observe a particle and not a wave because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which indicates that the more you know about a particle’s position, the less you know about its momentum (and the more you know about its momentum the less you know about its position). If we were able to study a photon’s momentum, we would know more about its wave function. But by observing it at a specific place (the screen) we only see it as a particle. Observation doesn’t magically cause the collapse. Liken it to studying a car driving from point a to point b. If we study the car at any point in time, like through a photo, we can’t tell how fast the car is moving, where it came from, or where it’s going. If we study the car’s speed, we know less about where it is at any given point. The car analogy is not perfect, since cars don’t move as fast as photons, but I described it the best I can!

So in other words, some say that observation “collapses” the probability wave, but that is because we are looking at a single moment in time and not at the wave function as a whole, which would describe every property of the photon (speed, angular momentum, wave function, the distribution of its energy throughout a medium, direction, source, etc.).

 

[inocente]

Yikes, I’ve never seen such an evasion and abandonment of reason. The bulb lights the second the filiment is excited. You can quibble if you want but that is instantaneous at the moment all the necessary conditions are meant for the propagation of light.

:banghead::banghead::banghead:

You got that right, your evasion knows no bounds. But perhaps you don’t even realize you’re doing it. See your words that I bolded above? You didn’t even distinguish between a second and instantaneous . Something seems really fast to you so you think it happens in no time at all. You’ve done this kind of thing repeatedly on different threads, this refusal to distinguish between the world and your subjective feelings about the world.

Thomas made an honest mistake, he didn’t play decadent word games to try to cover it up.

I even linked videos proving it’s a long way from instantaneous. I don’t have the time or inclination to play games with your bad temper, please don’t reply unless you can be objective and civil.

 

[inocente]

“Seeing” can mean different things. Ultimately we are talking about a cognitive event based on vision.

One sees light, one sees the monitor, one sees words: perceptions come organized as components of thought. The same environment, same “sensory (name removed by moderator)ut”, different sorts of experiences based on where one directs one’s attention/thinking/focus.

If one says one sees photons, one is bringing into the experience, models and concepts that they have learned.

On the monitor screen one sees brightness, colours, lines. If someone sees photons, they are simply placing a label on the experience and drifting off into thought. All these very likely, given the advancement of science, will be superseded by other models and concepts.

You say you see photons. What you are doing is giving a scientific explanation to the experience. One of the difficulties I have with science today is its dependence on extensions of sight. Vision tends to feel the world at a distance, without the intimacy of touch, taste or smell, even hearing. This skews the understanding of the world in a direction of detachment.

I like the idea of tasting photons because it returns the focus to how it is that we connect to the world.
To speak of “seeing photons” to me sounds simply like an intellectual exercise.
Introducing a different metaphor makes the visual world and the real world to which it connects, feel more immediate, more alive, more real, perhaps even more scary. I am tasting, touching the light bouncing off things, and it makes me more interested in what is actually out there.

There are mathematical descriptions that have emerged from investigations through the use of electronic extensions of our visual sense. However, visual models fail here; we will never “see” photons, as I do not think they can be accurately described using that form of understanding.

Sorry if I have not clarified what I mean. I am not actually as confused as I may sound.

I don’t really understand what you’re saying.

Some people, Euclid amongst them, thought our eyes emitted rays and that’s how we see. Sounds ridiculous now, but there you go. Others thought we see by rays entering the eye, and we now know a tremendous amount about sight.

For instance, we know that we can’t differentiate light at 580 nm from a mixture of light at 550 nm and 700 nm. We see both as yellow, yet the second is actually a mix of green and red. But some species of bird can distinguish the two, they perceive green-red as an extra color. Some insects can see frequencies of light which are invisible to us.

There’s a difference between the world and our perception of the world. Our perception even depends on our culture - Russians can separate dark blue and light blue faster than us because they have different words for them, while a lot of other languages have the same word for blue and green, so people see them as one color.

Physics tells us what is going on at a base level, but then we need to look at how it interacts with us, our minds and even our cultures. If you want to understand the effect that light has on our emotions and feelings, it’s probably easiest to become an artist, as that’s really the science of seeing.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

You got that right, your evasion knows no bounds. But perhaps you don’t even realize you’re doing it. See your words that I bolded above? You didn’t even distinguish between a second and instantaneous . Something seems really fast to you so you think it happens in no time at all. You’ve done this kind of thing repeatedly on different threads, this refusal to distinguish between the world and your subjective feelings about the world.

Thomas made an honest mistake, he didn’t play decadent word games to try to cover it up.

I even linked videos proving it’s a long way from instantaneous. I don’t have the time or inclination to play games with your bad temper, please don’t reply unless you can be objective and civil.

To say your are " evading " and not being " reasonable " is not bad temper. It is clear that until the moving electrons escape the opacity of the shielded wires there will be no light. But as soon as the electrons escape the shielded conditions and as soon as the electrons heat the filiment to the point of ignition, you will have light. At the instant the electrons at the filiment reach the proper excitation threshold, you have instantaneous light at the source. But from that instant to the instant you see the light, a millisecond of time has elapsed. That is understood. But at the sourse itself - before it reaches your eyes, the light is instaneous. That is the point I was making.

Linus2nd