Quote (ass666 @ Apr 4 2010 09:40pm)
why it happens
This question will get you into trouble. It is a throw back to pre-Newtonian ideas. That is that effects should have a reasonable reason for happening. This idea has slowly been dying since Newton's work with gravity and light. Newton cleaved the philosophical questions of why, from the evolution laws of a system. He gave no explanation of why (well he did give a few but he separated them very clearly from the evolution laws). He discovered some laws that will predict the future if you feed it parameters from the present.
So if you are searching for the philosophical answer of why the two slit experiment behaves the way it does, you are barking up the wrong tree. If you are looking for the evolution laws to predict the outcome of a 2 slit experiment these are available, but they are devoid of physical models.
But the complaints I can almost hearing you voicing are justifiable. It does violate common sense. But this certainly is not the first violation of "common sense" by physics. The idea that velocities should not be simply added is a very serious violation. Should we really be surprised that other common sense ideas like position, trajectory and even cause and effect need to be modified with a new set of logic?
To quote Feynman:
Quote
And then there's the ... kind of thing which you don't understand. Meaning "I don't believe it, it's crazy, it's the kind of thing I won't accept." .... this kind, I hope you'll come along with me and you'll have to accept it because it's the way nature works. If you want to know the way nature works, we looked at it, carefully, ... that's the way it works. You don't like it..., go somewhere else! To another universe! Where the rules are simpler, philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy. I can't help it! OK! If I'm going to tell you honestly what the world looks like to the... human beings who have struggled as hard as they can to understand it, I can only tell you what it looks like. And I cannot make it any simpler, I'm not going to do this, I'm not going to simplify it, and I'm not going to fake it. I'm not going to tell you it's something like a ball bearing inside a spring, it isn't.
There is a much better example than the two slit experiment, a situation we are all familiar with that demonstrates the problem in a much better way IMO. Consider the following situation:
You are standing outside your home at dust. You look into a window and you can see your friend sitting on the couch, but you can also see a partially reflected image of your face on the window. If you were to replace the window with a mirror the reflected image of your face would be brighter so obviously some of the light from your face is passing through the window and some of it is bouncing back to produce this ghostly image. What determines which photons get bounced back (or what determines which photons pass through)? There is an answer to the question but it involved aptitudes (probability), vectors, time, and other numbers. Any attempt to explain it without resorting to these will fail. (And no what they told you in grade school about the brightness outside vs. inside has nothing to do with it.)
This post was edited by Azrad on Apr 5 2010 01:37am
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