Starship Asterisk*

Suppose we run the experiment. After it is over, two people go in at different times. One of them looks at the timing data, the other doesn't. If I understand what you say correctly, the one that looked at the timing data would not see the interference pattern but the other one would, right? If som...

I am quite certain that there are no qualitative principles to resolve this. Only a quantitative result (not numbers, but mathematical expressions relating the parameters of the problem) can let us determine the possibility of a combination of parameters for which the spread of the pulse is not gre...

How do the photons know whether or not we are going to throw away the timing data? One might ask how (in the simple screen case, with one or two slits) a photon knows that the slit it didn't go through was covered or not. Measuring the flight time identifies the slit, essentially "covering&quo...

...but I don't yet get how event timing can be better than ~λ/c (Implied by Kim?), which is also the arrival timing difference between the slits. The event timing accuracy is a property of the pulse and detector timers; it doesn't depend on the photon wavelength. Our timers don't suddenly get crapp...

Here's a similar question. The nicest interference patterns are produced by diffraction gratings (lots of evenly spaced slits); just a few thin beams of light (an odd number) come out, each indicating a precise momentum. That's from throwing most of the position information away; you have no clue wh...

I think the spoiler goes wrong in assuming that it is possible in principle to measure the times precisely enough to make the interference go away. While true in principle, that's a hand-waving thing. (I guess it says something about your personality if you always post in spoiler tags.) Measuring t...

I'd still like to know if there can be intrinsic timing uncertainty imposed by the Uncertainty Principle. Why isn't it showing up in this problem? Energy and time are mutually unascertaintable measurables equivalent to position and momentum being mutually unascertainable measurables. (Just look at ...

First of all, one important thing to keep in mind about these double slit experiments: while it's easy to imagine how a huge stream of photons can all be interfering with each other at a screen, it generally defies people's intuition that this still happens with very dim sources. Even if the source ...