Re: Photon Duality (Feynman doesn't know why, do you?)

ytyourclothes_at_p.zapto.org
Date: 03/21/05 

Date: 21 Mar 2005 15:26:05 -0800

Prescott wrote:
>
> Ok. Guys So how does each photon know or make up its
> mind and all of them conspiring to produce 4%
> reflection and passing the rest of the 96%?
>

There is a certain probability p (about 53%) that a given pregnancy
results in a male baby. And thus 47% of pregnancies result in a female.

Explain to us how the individual wad of *** pumped into a woman "makes
up its mind" whether to make a male or female (or twins etc) descendant
such as to result in exactly the observed proportions.

Really, seriously.

The "classical" answer (that you don't want to hear) is that it doesn't
make up it's mind at all -- there is no underlying mechanism here
anywhere, merely a bunch of parameters that allow randomness to a
certain degree. Whenever we encounter statistical distributions, it
means there IS no underlying mechanism to direct one or another
outcome.

All the various soild-state variables give you a 4% probability of
reflection. Which means that any given photon has 4% probability of
being reflected. No mechanism. Nothing to see here. 53 out of every 100
squirts of cum that make it to an egg lead to a male child. Nobody
needs to "make up their mind" here anywhere.

1 out of every six dice you roll will show a "four", but you won't
identify a mechanism that tells dice "I should roll a four now". The
number "one in six" *tells* you that there's no mechanism.

> I only want open minded folks to answer. Because the
> dogma laden physicists will just tell you to believe
> light has behavior of particle and wave and that's it.
> No questions asked. Nothing unusual.

The claim that particles and waves are fundamentally different entities
is itself a dogma.

An ancient dogma akin to the one that heat and work are different
things. For many hundreds of years people have insisted on the naive
intuition that there's a fundamental difference between lifting a body,
accelerating it to high speed and heating it up. It was only when
people like Watt and Joules realized that there's an underlying unified
principle (what we call "Energy" today) that the formerly
thought-distinct entities "work" and "heat" were understood as merely
aspects of this underlying, more fundamental entity and that they can
be converted into each other (according to certain understandable and
measurable rules) and hence that heat engines (foremost the steam
engine) became possible.

Once you understand that "work" and "heat" are just to possible
expressions of something more fundamental, something more abstract,
something less open to naive intuition but perfectly containable in
mathematical form, there's nothing special about a heat engine or about
the conversion of heat into work and vice versa. There's truly nothing
"astonishing" or "strange" or "wondrous" about it. It is very mundane.

In the same vein, once you understand that the (naively intuitive)
separation of "particles" vs. "waves" is mistaken, and that the things
people have been calling "particles" and "waves" are merely forms of
the same underlying entity, that the one can be converted into the
other (according to certain understandable and measurable rules)
there's truly nothing "astonishing" left anywhere. There's no "riddle"
here anywhere - you study the matter until you suddenly slap your
forehead and say "oh, of course".

Try yourself to explain the concept of "energy" to someone who insists
that work and heat are fundamentally different things and that thus
they cannot be just simply converted into each other and that you
cannot just invoke frictional heat in order to explain where certain
amounts of work vanish to.

http://penguin.servehttp.com/sven/physics/b998cbbe-9901-448d-b9a0-b940d51e7d66.pdf

Once you are clear on this problem, you see the trouble physicists are
in when they encounter people who dogmatically proclaim that
"particles" and "waves" are fundamentally different things[1] and who
*deny* the obvious technological results of treating the two as aspects
of something more fundamental (by declaring them to be "dogma" to add
insult to injury).

cordially

Y.T. 

--
Remove YourClothes before you email me.
[1] Or "space" and "time", the other favorite of net.kooks
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