You know, I enjoyed this post when I first read it, but now upon further thought it doesn’t make any sense at all.
We’re talking about the fundamental nature of reality, right? Photons are a fundamental thing? Taking all paths from S to P is fundamental? Little rotating arrows corresponding to wavelength is fundamental? OK, fine.
But what the heck is this “mirror” thing you then introduced? I’m supposed to assume that a mirror is a fundamental component of reality too?
No, obviously a mirror is just made up of atoms, which is just a pile of subatomic particles, also. You don’t explain how a photon interacts with even a single other particle, but we’re supposed to know how it interacts with a mirror? Especially a “flat” mirror, when we know that real physical mirrors must be very bumpy at a subatomic level. And a lot of them are silver; what’s so special about silver atoms? Why is a mirror different from a (not very) flat rock?
See, here’s the problem: you spend all this time telling us how our macroscopic intuitions are wrong, and we can’t trust them, and that QM is the reality of how the universe works. And then, in the explanation of QM, you slip in a “mirror”, and rely on our naive pre-QM common-sense understanding of mirrors to complete the example. But you’ve just told us that those intuitions are false!
I think you need to at least give some QM explanation of what a mirror “is”, before using it in this example.
You know, I enjoyed this post when I first read it, but now upon further thought it doesn’t make any sense at all.
We’re talking about the fundamental nature of reality, right? Photons are a fundamental thing? Taking all paths from S to P is fundamental? Little rotating arrows corresponding to wavelength is fundamental? OK, fine.
But what the heck is this “mirror” thing you then introduced? I’m supposed to assume that a mirror is a fundamental component of reality too?
No, obviously a mirror is just made up of atoms, which is just a pile of subatomic particles, also. You don’t explain how a photon interacts with even a single other particle, but we’re supposed to know how it interacts with a mirror? Especially a “flat” mirror, when we know that real physical mirrors must be very bumpy at a subatomic level. And a lot of them are silver; what’s so special about silver atoms? Why is a mirror different from a (not very) flat rock?
See, here’s the problem: you spend all this time telling us how our macroscopic intuitions are wrong, and we can’t trust them, and that QM is the reality of how the universe works. And then, in the explanation of QM, you slip in a “mirror”, and rely on our naive pre-QM common-sense understanding of mirrors to complete the example. But you’ve just told us that those intuitions are false!
I think you need to at least give some QM explanation of what a mirror “is”, before using it in this example.