Albert Einstein - Horizon TV - Raymond Chiao - Russet McMillan - David Deutsch - Richard P Feynman - Max Planck - Paul Dirac - Einstein’s Quantum Riddle TV -
All the fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no closer to answer the question, ‘What are light quanta?’ Of course today every rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is deluding himself. Albert Einstein, cited Lam ‘Seasonal Affective Disorder and Beyond’
The photons arrive at the slits one at a time. So those that get through the screen on the other side should make two bright lines. They shouldn’t interfere and make the full pattern of stripes, but they do. Horizon: The Time Lords, BBC 1996
Single photons ... What you get is something completely different: even though only single photon of light are being fired through the slits they don’t create two lines, they mysteriously create three. Horizon: What is Reality? BBC 2011
If you put detectors by the slits, the mysterious behaviour stops. The photons behave just like bullets. Take the detectors away – the multiple stripes mysteriously re-appear. So what is going on? Rather astonishingly it seems we can change the way reality behaves just by looking at it. But this means reality has a secret life of its own. ibid.
According to this theory the photon of light faces two slits; it doesn’t split in two – it splits the world in two. Every photon in the double slit experiment creates a new parallel world. ibid.
In our experiments we have measured that a single photon can tunnel across a tunnel barrier at one point seven times the speed of light. Professor Raymond Chiao, University of California
We’re sending out about a hundred quadrillion photons with each pulse. If we’re lucky for each pulse we might get back one photon. Dr Russet McMillan, Apache Point Telescope measuring laser shots at the moon
The result of the single photon interference experiment is the strangest thing I know. It is conclusive evidence that reality does not consist of just a single universe. Because that result couldn’t have come about unless there were another nearby universe interfering with ours. Dr David Deutsch, Oxford University
Philosophers have said that if the same circumstances don’t always produce the same results, predictions are impossible and science will collapse. Here is a circumstance – identical photons are always coming down in the same direction to the piece of glass – that produces different results. We cannot predict whether a given photon will arrive at A or B. All we can predict is that out of 100 photons that come down, an average of 4 will be reflected by the front surface. Does this mean that physics, a science of great exactitude, has been reduced to calculating only the probability of an event, and not predicting exactly what will happen? Yes. That’s a retreat, but that’s the way it is: Nature permits us to calculate only probabilities. Yet science has not collapsed. Richard P Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, 1985
The photons which constitute a ray of light behave like intelligent human beings: out of all possible curves they always select the one which will take them most quickly to their goal. Max Planck
When we make the photon meet a tourmaline crystal, we are subjecting it to an observation. We are observing whether it is polarised parallel or perpendicular to the optic axis. The effect of making the observation is to force the photon entirely into the state of perpendicular polarisation. It has to make a sudden jump from being partly in each of these two states to being entirely in one or other of them. Which of the two states it will jump into cannot be predicted, but is governed only by probability laws. If it jumps into the perpendicular state it passes through the crystal and appears on the other side preserving this state of polarisation. Paul A M Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics 1930
Our perception of the universe is an illusion: they are connecting two of Europe’s largest telescopes … perhaps the strangest idea in science: quantum entanglement … Can particles be connected as if they joined together even if they are millions of miles apart? Einstein rejected the idea … Is Entanglement real? Einstein’s Quantum Riddle ***** BBC 2020
The electron is just a wave of fuzzy probability. ibid.
Quantum Physics: Its mathematics were elegant and beautiful. ibid.
The Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox: a seemingly magical effect … How could two particles act in unison? ibid.
The particles were fuzzy and undefined until the moment they were observed. ibid.
In theory this technique could be used to create a totally secure global communications network. These are the first steps of a completely unhackable quantum internet of the future. Made possible by quantum entanglement. ibid.