View Single Post
  #7  
Old 29-10-2019, 05:34 PM
gary
Registered User

gary is offline
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Mt. Kuring-Gai
Posts: 5,914
Quote:
Originally Posted by morls View Post
The image I have in my mind of these photons is of a stream of ping-pong balls being fired out of a nerf gun. I think my classical training is showing!
Hi Stephen,

If you try and imagine the balls not as discrete balls but as probability
curves - what are termed "probability amplitudes" - you are part of the way there.

Undergraduate level lecture by Richard Feynman where he discuses
probability amplitudes wrt the double split experiment -
http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_03.html

Don't make the mistake of feeling somehow inadequate if you
can't visualize it. Nobody can. Even he warns :-

Quote:
Originally Posted by Feynman
In this subject we have, of course, the difficulty that the quantum mechanical behavior of things is quite strange. Nobody has an everyday experience to lean on to get a rough, intuitive idea of what will happen. So there are two ways of presenting the subject: We could either describe what can happen in a rather rough physical way, telling you more or less what happens without giving the precise laws of everything; or we could, on the other hand, give the precise laws in their abstract form. But, then because of the abstractions, you wouldn’t know what they were all about, physically. The latter method is unsatisfactory because it is completely abstract, and the first way leaves an uncomfortable feeling because one doesn’t know exactly what is true and what is false. We are not sure how to overcome this difficulty.
Graphic :-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_f...rAnimation.gif
Reply With Quote