Physic's greatest question

[Pyrotex]

...The only paradox acceptable here is: thinking the unthinkable! Thinking God is a paradox only in the same way as thinking the unthinkable....

Actually, that says my point rather well.

Trying to analyze God produces paradoxes just like "thinking the unthinkable".

 

I'm sure this is not what you had in mind, but I couldn't help pointing out this useful metaphor.

[Qfwfq]

Well, Pyrotex, I'll find a forum with a 4 Terabyte limit to post sizes and tell ya what's wrong with you!!! :shrug:

 

I Googled the second question, but could find nothing in the time I had.

Actually, I repeated your wording for consistency but my intended inference was 'When?' more than 'Who?'.

 

When the Young experiment was first performed for single photons, was there a reason IYXO for them to have expected a different result? I'm sure they weren't quite certain of what to expect, much like M&M couldn't have been quite certain, but experiments with electrons including the first ones on diffraction from crystals simply confirmed results that I'm quite sure de Broglie would have suggested.

[Pyrotex]

Well, Pyrotex, I'll find a forum with a 4 Terabyte limit to post sizes and tell ya what's wrong with you!!! :confused:

You'll blow my cover!!!! :lol: :eek: :eek:

Actually,...my intended inference was 'When?' more than 'Who?'. When the Young experiment was first performed for single photons, was there a reason IYXO for them to have expected a different result?...

Try to put yourself in their place. They had never done the double-slit where there was no overlap in the time-domain of the photons. There had always been an overlap and it was easy (???) to conceptualize the wave-mechanics of interference.

 

I imagine, they were curious as to how small the photon emission frequency would have to be for the interference to fail. I imagine it was a shock to discover that the interference did not fail at all. (IMXO) :)

[Qfwfq]

I imagine, they were curious as to how small the photon emission frequency would have to be for the interference to fail. I imagine it was a shock to discover that the interference did not fail at all. (IMXO) :cup:

IYXO!!!!!! :)

 

IMHO, they certainly were baffled by the idea of single photon interference and therefore set out to check whether ther's a threshold of some kind, but neither could they expect exactly that there should be one. They were baffled by the whole thing, I'd say, they certainly didn't discover by pure serendipity that the pattern holds even one-at-a-time, so it wasn't something you could call totally unexpected.

 

BTW, before the Born-Copenhagen interpretation became the mainstream one, there were those who seriously considered alternatives which are less counterintuitive but fall into trouble only on more sophisticated scrutiny. Even Schrödinger as late as around the mid 20th century was a supporter of ascribing more reality to the "waves" than to the "little balls", which could always be conserved statistically. It wasn't so soon that this possibility could be discarded by experimental test. It's a very subtle matter and, IMESHO, the real refutation of it is the violation of Bell's inequalities.