“we send some photons toward the half-silvered mirror, one at a time, and count up how many photons arrive at Detector 1 versus Detector 2 over a few thousand trials. The ratio of these values is the ratio of the squared moduli of the amplitudes. But the reason for this is not something we are going to consider yet.”
OK, but I’d still like to see a little link or something here that takes me straight to the next article where this is properly dealt with, since this seems to be the biggest gap in understanding that the current article leaves open: over and over you tell us that there are no actual probabilities involved in the phenomena at the level of the territory, yet in my quote you have exactly a probabilistic description, with multiple trials that arbitrarily yield one of the two possible results, in stark conflict with the rest of your explanation which tells us the same thing is actually happening each time (the amplitudes are always the same).
The tiniest extra hint would do a world of good here (or at the end of the article): is it that quantum impurities always stray unpredictably into our experimental setups in the real world and actually change the amplitudes involved? Or what?
“we send some photons toward the half-silvered mirror, one at a time, and count up how many photons arrive at Detector 1 versus Detector 2 over a few thousand trials. The ratio of these values is the ratio of the squared moduli of the amplitudes. But the reason for this is not something we are going to consider yet.”
OK, but I’d still like to see a little link or something here that takes me straight to the next article where this is properly dealt with, since this seems to be the biggest gap in understanding that the current article leaves open: over and over you tell us that there are no actual probabilities involved in the phenomena at the level of the territory, yet in my quote you have exactly a probabilistic description, with multiple trials that arbitrarily yield one of the two possible results, in stark conflict with the rest of your explanation which tells us the same thing is actually happening each time (the amplitudes are always the same).
The tiniest extra hint would do a world of good here (or at the end of the article): is it that quantum impurities always stray unpredictably into our experimental setups in the real world and actually change the amplitudes involved? Or what?