Brent> "But why not just decide, probabilistically, for each photon, where it will be absorbed?" OK, I'm listening. How does this work, exactly? Also, where is the parallelism? At 10:47 PM 6/30/2014, meekerdb wrote:
On 6/30/2014 9:24 PM, Henry Baker wrote:
Cramer's "transactional" interpretation of QM is very computer sciencey, at least to my eyes.
Consider a thought experiment in which you're going to construct a parallel computer simulation of the double slit experiment, and you compute the probability density of photons at a uniform sampling of points in space.
The problem comes when you have to flip a probability-weighted coin at each point of the photon absorber in order to decide if a photon will be absorbed at that point. The problem is that you can't decide _locally_ and _independently_ at each absorbing point whether to absorb a photon at that point, because you have to guarantee the conservation of energy. The problem is that energy isn't just conserved _probabilistically_, but _exactly_, so if you choose badly, you can have more photons being absorbed than were emitted -- a clear violation of the conservation of energy.
But why not just decide, probabilistically, for each photon, where it will be absorbed? That guarantees conservation of photon number.