On Wednesday, July 23, 2014 5:21:19 PM UTC-4, jeroen Belleman wrote:   
   > 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.   
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   > >>   
   >   
   > >> Rich   
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   > >   
   >   
   > > Rich can I change your question to something that is kinda doable?   
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   > >   
   >   
   > > 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.   
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   > >   
   >   
   > > George H.   
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   >   
   > 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!   
      
   That's OK, I was just trying to help out Rich with something more doable.   
   At high intensity you see the light is spread out of some large area, but only   
   give ticks one detector at a time.   
   >   
   > 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.   
      
   I'm agnostic about things I can't know.  So photon is just a *very* useful   
   concept.  (I think we've done the "is the photon real" thing already :^)  But   
   these heralded single photon experiments are convincing enough for me.   
      
   George Herold.   
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   > Jeroen Belleman   
      
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