It’s been a long and brutally busy week here, so I really ought to just take a day off from blogging. But there’s a new paper in Science on quantum physics that’s just too good to pass up, so here’s a ReasearchBlogging post to close out the week. Aw, c’mon, dude, I’m tired. What’s so […]
Tag: light
Counterfactual Physics: Lorentz Variance?
The theory of relativity takes its name from a very simple and appealing idea: that the laws of physics should look the same to moving observers as to stationary ones. “Laws of physics” here includes Maxwell’s equations for electricity and magnetism, which necessarily means that moving observers must see the same speed of light as […]
Why Antibunching Equals Photons
In my post about how we know photons exist, I make reference to the famous Kimble, Dagenais, and Mandel experiment showing “anti-bunching” of photons emitted from an excited atom. They observed that the probability of recording a second detector “click” a very short time after the first was small. This is conclusive evidence that photons […]