Re: Quantum mystics

On 6/10/24 20:26, Phil Hobbs wrote:
[Snip...]

 Sticking with the semiclassical picture of photodetection is good, because
it avoids almost all of the blunders made by the photons-as-billiard-balls
folk, but it doesn’t get you out of the mystery.
 The really mysterious thing about photodetection is that a given photon (*)
 incident on a large lossless detector gives rise to exactly one detection
event, with probability spatialy and temporally weighted by E**2.
 Doesn’t seem so bad yet, but consider this:
If the detector is large compared with the pulse width/c, distant points on
the detector are separated by a spacelike interval.
 That means that so when point A detects it, there is no way for the
information reach point B before the end of the pulse, when E drops to
zero, and yet experimentally point B doesn’t detect it.
 (*) a quantized excitation of a harmonic oscillator mode of the EM field in
a given set of boundary conditions)
 Cheers
 Phil Hobbs

We don't have single-photon-on-demand sources, nor perfect detectors.
Both sources and detectors are probabilistic. I'd like to see how
this argument fares using energy resolving detectors like TESs.
I do not expect the probability of a detection event in one spot to
be affected instantly by a detection event somewhere else. The
collapse of the wave function is an attempt to apply statistical
reasoning to a single event.
Jeroen Belleman