From: jeroen@nospam.please
On 23/07/14 21:36, ggherold@gmail.com wrote:
> On Monday, July 21, 2014 5:55:26 PM UTC-4, RichD wrote:
>> Let's say you radiate a pulse of energy from a dipole antenna at
>> 100 MHz, equal to a single photon. Sort of tiny, but elctrical
>> engineers are a clever lot, I'm sure they're up to it.
>
>>
>> Rich
>
> Rich can I change your question to something that is kinda doable?
>
> So say a set up a light source on earth. Maybe it's monochromatic,
> but that shouldn't really matter. And I can put attenuators in the
> beam such that I can reduce the intensity to ~1 photon/ second*. Now
> on the moon I set up a big array of PMT's. (and I also shut off the
> sun and all other light sources :^) We'll imagine the array covers
> the beam spread. And now I monitor the PMT's. What do I see?
> (Except for dark counts and stray light and all that.) I see a
> detection in one PMT and then a different one.. etc, the beam is
> spread out over many miles or whatever. But I still get one count at
> a time.
>
> George H.
What you'll see is that the detectors trigger randomly and
independently. No correlation. The trigger rate will obey Poisson
statistics. That's no proof that light is quantized! Only that the
light *detectors* are!
Even if we admit that light is a classical wave phenomenon, it is
possible to reduce the intensity to the point that there is a
arbitrarily small probability that two detectors trigger 'at the
same time'. But that probability will never quite reach zero. The
concept of 'at the same time' also needs further qualification.
Does it mean in the same nanosecond? On the same day?
I've never seen an experiment that convincingly demonstrates
that light is indeed quantized.
Jeroen Belleman
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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