(I can’t find the “rerun” version of this page, so am posting my questions here).
For all these types of experiments, how do they “aim” the particle so it hits its target from far away? It would seem that the experimenters would know pretty much where the particle is when it shoots out of the gun (or whatever), so would not the velocity be all over the place? In the post on the Heisenberg principle, there was an example of letting the sun shine through a hole in a piece of paper, which caused the photons to spread pretty widely, pretty quickly.
Does the polarization vector change as the photon moves along? It seems to be very similar to a photon’s “main” wave function, as it can be represented as a complex number (and is even displayed as an arrow, like Feynman uses). But I know those Feynman arrows spin according to the photon’s wavelength.
Finally—and this is really tripping me up—why can we put in the minus sign in the equation that you say “we will need” later, instead of a + sign? If you have two blobs of amplitude, you need to add them to get the wave function, yes? If that is not the case, I have SEVERELY misunderstood the most basic posts of this sequence.
(I can’t find the “rerun” version of this page, so am posting my questions here).
For all these types of experiments, how do they “aim” the particle so it hits its target from far away? It would seem that the experimenters would know pretty much where the particle is when it shoots out of the gun (or whatever), so would not the velocity be all over the place? In the post on the Heisenberg principle, there was an example of letting the sun shine through a hole in a piece of paper, which caused the photons to spread pretty widely, pretty quickly.
Does the polarization vector change as the photon moves along? It seems to be very similar to a photon’s “main” wave function, as it can be represented as a complex number (and is even displayed as an arrow, like Feynman uses). But I know those Feynman arrows spin according to the photon’s wavelength.
Finally—and this is really tripping me up—why can we put in the minus sign in the equation that you say “we will need” later, instead of a + sign? If you have two blobs of amplitude, you need to add them to get the wave function, yes? If that is not the case, I have SEVERELY misunderstood the most basic posts of this sequence.
You have already asked these 3 questions and had them answered: http://lesswrong.com/lw/btv/seq_rerun_on_being_decoherent/6f5f
To clarify the answer at point 3, if you phase shift by half a cycle and add, well, that’s called ‘subtraction’.
Thanks; sorry about the duplicate question post, I had not been able to find the “replay” version of this particular article.