New magnetic component discovered in the Faraday effect

Not a physicist, just here to observe single photons weren't reliably emitted until the modern era. like the 1970s. The double slit experiment pre-dates this. it's from 1801. The one which confirms "self interaction" was 1974. I was in high school 1973-78 so the stuff we did, was comparatively "new" physics in that sense. Not a message I remember receiving at the time.

From the pop-sci history reading I do, "detecting" reliable generation of single photon STREAMS in the early days depended on using mechanisms which inherently would release a sequence of photons on a time base, over time, and then gating the time sufficiently accurately to have high confidence you know the time base, and can discriminate an "individual" from the herd.

I don't doubt quantum theory. I only observe it's mostly for young students (like almost all received wisdom) grounded in experiments which don't actually do what people think they do. The ones you run in the school lab are illustrative not probative.

What people do in places like the BIPM in Paris, or CERN, isn't the same as that experiment you did with a ticker-tape and a weighted trolleycar down a ramp. "it's been confirmed" is the unfortunate reality of received wisdom, and inherently depends on trust in science. I do trust science.

Now we have quantum dots, and processes which will depend on reliably emitting single photons and single electrons, the trust has moved beyond "because they did it in CERN" into "because it's implemented in the chipset attached to the system I am using" -QC will need massive amounts of reliably generated single instance signals.

> just here to observe single photons weren't reliably emitted until the modern era.

A dim light bulb from a few feet away emits on the order of 1k photons/sec, which is low enough that you can count individual emissions using fairly simple analog equipment [0] [1].

> The double slit experiment pre-dates this. it's from 1801. The one which confirms "self interaction" was 1974.

There's an experiment from 1909 that demonstrated the double-slit experiment with single(ish) photons [2].

> I only observe it's mostly for young students (like almost all received wisdom) grounded in experiments which don't actually do what people think they do. The ones you run in the school lab are illustrative not probative.

> What people do in places like the BIPM in Paris, or CERN, isn't the same as that experiment you did with a ticker-tape and a weighted trolleycar down a ramp. "it's been confirmed" is the unfortunate reality of received wisdom, and inherently depends on trust in science. I do trust science.

The double-slit experiment is actually fairly easy and cheap to run [3]. Certainly more complicated than ticker tape, but not by much.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillation_counter

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photomultiplier_tube

[2]: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/31034247

[3]: https://www.teachspin.com/two-slit

They are increasingly unstable, hence why I pondered about some enthropic limit the higher up it goes in the enthropy ladder.

Atoms are quite stable, even though they also suffer from quantum decay; then molecules can be stable but are less stable than atoms; up the ladder to biochemistry it starts to become more unstable the more complex it gets; so on and so forth.

Stable societies might be something that humans haven't achieved yet but somewhere in the Universe some other lifeform might, each rung of the ladder will filter out the most unstable versions of it, coalescing into the emergence of the more stable versions of it. Advanced technology is very unstable for us, requiring constant maintenance by intelligent humans.

Of course, it's just food for thought :)

Soon!