Alex McColgan
speaker
29,301 appearances
104 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 6d ago
Alex McColgan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 68 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 11.
Appearances
How does adding more blockages increase the amount of light that makes it through?
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but this result actually rules out the possibility that the light has a fixed orientation.
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It must be snapping into focus at each new lens, rolling a quantum dice each time to see if it was the right orientation all along or not.
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If it makes it through the first lens, a 50% chance, it only did so because it was oriented perfectly perpendicular to the lens's polarisation.
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Which means once it reaches the second,
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It's coming at it from a polarisation that's diagonal, so once again there's a 50-50 chance that it makes it through.
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It rolls a quantum dice again, and once again has a 50-50 chance of proceeding.
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If it gets through this hurdle too, then it again snaps to the new orientation, as if it were that new orientation all along, which it obviously wasn't.
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which means that now it's polarised diagonally relative to the third lens, meaning that it now has a final 50% chance of getting through.
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Of course, some photons do not make it through all three of these probabilistic gauntlets, only about 12.5% of them make it, but that's more than 0%, which is what was happening previously when you only had two lenses.
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Light likes to behave in discrete quantities.
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It is quantum.
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It seemingly snaps to a discrete value when observed, and honestly, we don't really know why.
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If you think about a wave, there is no reason why you couldn't simply have half a wave
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could half it again and again an infinite number of times and still have an answer that makes mathematical sense.
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And yet, it seems that down on a low enough quantum scale, you can't half light past a certain point.
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You can't have half a photon, or even one and a half photons.
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And if you try to do so, the photon instead snaps to one or the other nearest integer, based on probabilities, but only when it's asked
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Otherwise, it's quite content to exist probabilistically, interfering with itself like a wave as it travels along, before jumping to an answer when later asked exactly where it is.
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What is going on here?
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Showing 2141–2160 of 29,301 · page 108 of 1466
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