Re: Do I Misunderstand The Double Slit Experiment
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I'll end with something spooky. Lets say you set up the experiment and dont measure which slit the photons go through. You'll see a wave pattern on the screen. Now, if you replace the screen with a very sensitive potodetector that can in principle show where individual photons are arriving... then you'll see individual photons arriving... BUT with many more photons arriving in the bright fringes, and very few arriving in the dark fringes. In other words... you see individual photons, but arriving in the intensity pattern expected from a wave going through the slits and interfering with itself!
Spooky, isnt it?
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This is really the only spooky part of this. It is even weirder to think that you can slow down the rate at which you emit the photons to something like 1 per hour and you will still get an interference pattern. So it has nothing to do with 2 different photons interacting with each other.
So though an individual photon can only go through one slit, it "knows" that the other one is there. The standard explanation is it doesn't make sense to talk about photons until a measurement forces localization. Others claim that the many worlds interpretation of QM is needed to explain this.
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