Re: Quantum mystics

On Mon, 10 Jun 2024 23:15:51 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
<jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:

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

Higher energy photons, like gamma rays, can be detected with 100%
probability. They pack a lot of energy.