Re: Quantum mystics

On Tue, 11 Jun 2024 22:06:10 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
<jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:

On 6/10/24 23:24, john larkin wrote:

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

On 6/10/24 20:26, Phil Hobbs wrote:
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[Snip...]
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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.
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The really mysterious thing about photodetection is that a given photon (*)
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incident on a large lossless detector gives rise to exactly one detection
event, with probability spatialy and temporally weighted by E**2.
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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.
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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.
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(*) a quantized excitation of a harmonic oscillator mode of the EM field in
a given set of boundary conditions)
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Cheers
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Phil Hobbs

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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.
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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.
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Jeroen Belleman

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

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Yes, but you'd need to use quite dense stuff to have a good
chance of intercepting it. Lead tungstate is the thing these
days.
>
Jeroen Belleman

I suspect that a tight spectral resolution (and some gamma lines are a
few per cent wide) implies high detection efficiency.

Visible light is just too wimpy to get clear quantum detection.