And thats the point its a single photon from a quantum dot (there was a pile of anti-bunching testing done to check it was only one photon) so the photon should have only 1 path not hundreds. Remember those paths are going to be the "light" spot of an interference pattern against itself and it is a partcile on trajectory on each and every path which are meters apart. You can backtrack the trajectory to which slot it came through.

We can't proove to you that it is the same parcticle everywhere beyond that because of QM.

The reality old interpretations are going to have to contrive ways to explain the results like that the particle chooses a different path randomly each time and thats why we see partciles on each of trajectories or its only a wave as it goes through the slit they couldnt get the trajectory up any closer to the slit. But that begs the question why does it change at the slit and how would it even know there was a slit.

I saw a really neat analagy.

Quote:

Assume that you want to measure the weight of a sheet of paper. But the problem is that your measurement apparatus (weighing scale) is not precise enough to measure the weight of such a light object such as a sheet of paper. In this sense, the measurement of a single sheet of paper is - weak.

Now you do a trick. Instead of weighing one sheet of paper, you weigh a thousand of them, which is heavy enough to see the result of weighing. Then you divide this result by 1000, and get a number which you call - weak value. Clearly, this "weak value" is nothing but the average weight of your set of thousand sheets of papers.

But still, you want to know the weight of a SINGLE sheet of paper. So does that average value helps? Well, it depends:

1) If all sheets of papers have the same weight, then the average weight is equal to weight of the single sheet, in which case you have also measured the true weight of the sheet.

2) If the sheets have only approximately equal weights, then you can say that you have at least approximately measured the weight of a single sheet.

3) But if the weights of different sheets are not even approximately equal, then you have not done anything - you still don't have a clue what is the weight of a single sheet.

But what if you don't even know whether 1), 2) or 3) is true? Then you have different interpretations of your weak measurement. And that is precisely the case with quantum mechanics: We don't know whether particles have even approximately equal velocities at the same position (with the same wave function), so we have different interpretations. Bohmian interpretation says they have exactly equal velocities, which corresponds to the case 1), while Copenhagen interpretation corresponds to the case 3).


No one is ever going to be able hard proove to you beyond this if you believe one of the other options they are equally valid beacuse I will never be able to disproove them QM stops me.

However you are also ignoring alot of the other weirdness thrown up by QM because we have done this with electrons, neutrons, whole atoms, and entire conglomerates of atoms and they all do the same thing but we had the reverse problem we were struggling with where the wave like behaviour came from.

I don't buy either Bohmian or Copenhagen views I am a number 2 man and that means a different yet to be defined interpretation.

Last edited by Orac; 06/14/11 08:31 AM.
I believe in "Evil, Bad, Ungodly fantasy science and maths", so I am undoubtedly wrong to you.