Re: Actual photons?

From: Guy Macon (http://www.guymacon.com)
Date: 09/06/04 

Date: Sun, 05 Sep 2004 21:17:19 -0700

HAVRILIAK <havriliak@aol.com> says...
>
>>This is false. A fairly standard result from stochastic processes
>
>You sound like a polymer person. There is always a built in bias,
>otherwize the net result is zero.

You are wrong. The chances of a random walk bringing you to the
starting place aproaches zero as time goes on.

You can prove this for yourself. Make a number line like this:

...-9 -8 -7 6 5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 +1 +2 +3 +4 +5 +6 +7 +8 +9...
                            ^
                         POINTER

Now start flipping a coin, moving the pointer one place to the
right if it comes up heads, left if tails.

You will find that the pointer gets farther and farther from the
starting point, and less and less likely to get back to zero.

If you suspect a coin bias, flip twice as often and move the
pointer one place to the right on heads-heads or tails-tails,
left on heads-tails or tails-heads. Or you can take my word
that the results will not change.

You can even do a computer simulation if you have a source of
random numbers such as /dev/random/ on a Linux box.
(The pseudorandom generator that comes with your computer
language is *not* random.)

Do the experiment, then report the results.

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