No you can not take a picture because you are only allowed to take weak measurements.

What they are doing is reconstructing the trajectories (they know a position and time but not together) and from that they put the partcile in both slits similtaneous, admittedly based on probability.

And thats the point the text books which use Bohr interpretation are wrong.

Edit: The original article has a better image of the single photon tracks emitted by the quantum dot generator
http://www.aip.org.au/Congress2010/Abstr...rajectories.pdf

Edit: I found a more layman breakdown of the experiment which may help

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/06/an-experiment-that-just-keeps-on-giving.ars

I loved the comment.

Quote:

The current experiment can be described as a physicist hearing that the photon went through both slits, agreeing, but then saying, "No, seriously, which slit did the photon go through?" Yes, there remains a visceral and fundamental discomfort with the realities of quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, this discomfort has led to a very clever experiment that comes as close as is possible to answering this question.



At every point along the trajectory including going through both slits there was a particle it was never just a wave.

So what we are probably looking at is something like a more modern explaination, I think the doug sweetser (the standup physicist) does a pretty good job here (http://www.science20.com/standup_physicist/why_quantum_mechanics_weird-79513)


At no point do we have light as solely a wave it is always a particle and yes it can go through two slits simultaneous. The wave like behaviour comes from its fundemental quantum nature.

This is a bit like the problem of time in relativity observers can disagree on time because of there frame of reference what doug is showing and mathematically is the reverse of that, observers can disagree on 3d space positions and that is what the experiment shows.

It's not a massive shift you just need to accept that there is always a particle and it can be at two places at once rather than a wave which collapses back to a particle.

When you think about entagled partciles it really is no different and that looks to be where we are heading.

Superposition looks to be a norm for photons and given we can do it to "soild" things is it really that surprising.

There are more and more experiments showing the same thing I am seeing them daily

http://francisworldinsideout.wordpress.c...-the-same-time/

Coming at it from the other way you also do a controlled entanglement of a photon

http://www.physorg.com/news197900557.html
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-chinese-team-entangles-photons.html

There are groups setting up to attempt double slit with entangled photons which should really show us some things.

I should also add this actually may ease the explaination of of the H2 and other particle experiments with double slits

http://www-als.lbl.gov/index.php/science...ysics-meet.html
http://www.physorg.com/news113822439.html

and more recent matter experiments

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-scientists-quantum-breakthrough.html

Light and matter seem to be converging in QM.

Can we definitively say all this to be true at the moment ... no ... but in the same way almost all the old classic "stories" in the text books have shown to be wrong.


Last edited by Orac; 06/14/11 05:23 AM.

I believe in "Evil, Bad, Ungodly fantasy science and maths", so I am undoubtedly wrong to you.