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From: Jeroen Belleman <jeroen@nospam.please>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Quantum mystics
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2024 23:15:51 +0200
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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