Photon Experiment: What Will I See on Wall B?

[DrChinese]

This is undemostrable. You can only say that you see single pointed flashes of light on the screen, you can't say it was because of a tiny corpuscle which has flown from the source and that have hit the screen (if this is what you intended). ..

So are you now agreeing with Cthugha's points? As opposed to the above? The idea of photons as discrete has been demonstrated very well, even has become an undergrad experiment:

"Observing the quantum behavior of light in an undergraduate laboratory"
J. J. Thorn, M. S. Neel, V. W. Donato, G. S. Bergreen, R. E. Davies, and M. Becka
Received 4 December 2003; accepted 15 March 2004

While the classical, wavelike behavior of light (interference and diffraction) has been easily
observed in undergraduate laboratories for many years, explicit observation of the quantum nature of light (i.e., photons) is much more difficult. For example, while well-known phenomena such as the photoelectric effect and Compton scattering strongly suggest the existence of photons, they are not definitive proof of their existence. Here we present an experiment, suitable for an undergraduate laboratory, that unequivocally demonstrates the quantum nature of light. Spontaneously downconverted light is incident on a beamsplitter and the outputs are monitored with single-photon counting detectors. We observe a near absence of coincidence counts between the two detectors—a result inconsistent with a classical wave model of light, but consistent with a quantum description in which individual photons are incident on the beamsplitter. More explicitly, we measured the degree of second-order coherence between the outputs to be g(2)(0)50.017760.0026, which
violates the classical inequality g(2)(0)>1 by 377 standard deviations.

© 2004 American Association of Physics Teachers.

 

[lightarrow]

This is undemostrable. You can only say that you see single pointed flashes of light on the screen, you can't say it was because of a tiny corpuscle which has flown from the source and that have hit the screen (if this is what you intended).

So are you now agreeing with Cthugha's points? As opposed to the above?

But Cthugha's point is not completely opposed to the above, infact he wrote:

Ok, let me at first state, that I consider a single photon to be a single excitation of the quantized em-field and that I consider the discreteness of energy to be the defining property of the term "single". So, considering usual measurements, which involve detection of single photons, arriving is just defined by the absorption of this discrete amount of energy
...
Of course you cannot imagine photons as tiny balls flying through space...

The idea of photons as discrete has been demonstrated very well, even has become an undergrad experiment:

"Observing the quantum behavior of light in an undergraduate laboratory"
J. J. Thorn, M. S. Neel, V. W. Donato, G. S. Bergreen, R. E. Davies, and M. Becka
Received 4 December 2003; accepted 15 March 2004

While the classical, wavelike behavior of light (interference and diffraction) has been easily
observed in undergraduate laboratories for many years, explicit observation of the quantum nature of light (i.e., photons) is much more difficult. For example, while well-known phenomena such as the photoelectric effect and Compton scattering strongly suggest the existence of photons, they are not definitive proof of their existence. Here we present an experiment, suitable for an undergraduate laboratory, that unequivocally demonstrates the quantum nature of light. Spontaneously downconverted light is incident on a beamsplitter and the outputs are monitored with single-photon counting detectors. We observe a near absence of coincidence counts between the two detectors—a result inconsistent with a classical wave model of light, but consistent with a quantum description in which individual photons are incident on the beamsplitter. More explicitly, we measured the degree of second-order coherence between the outputs to be g(2)(0)50.017760.0026, which
violates the classical inequality g(2)(0)>1 by 377 standard deviations.

© 2004 American Association of Physics Teachers.

Anyway, those results made me think and I'm strongly considering the idea that is the EM field to be really quantized (as assumed in QED), instead of the interaction EM field-detector only.
Thank you.