Abstract
What is today’s mental model of the photon? Naively materialistic projectile or corpuscular interpretations of light were defended not only by Isaac Newton and his many nineteenth-century acolytes but by important experimental physicists from the following century, such as Johannes Stark or Arthur Holly Compton. Thomas Young, Augustin Fresnel and many other scientists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century countered it with an equally naively absolutist wave theory of light underpinned by Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetic radiation. Neither of these interpretations can account for the wave-particle duality established in 1909. That’s why Sects. 9.1–9.2 argue in favor of an ontologically restrained, instrumentalistic interpretation and advise against naive realism or the illegitimate assignment of locality. Sect. 9.4 goes further to warn against our tendency to individualize reality. Only thus can the Bose-Einstein statistics be duly accounted for. All of this is so counterintuitive to us, schooled by macroscopic experience, that the light quantum-alias photon-must remain a“mysterious Cheshire ca” or “elusive beast”.
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Notes
- 1.
See here the beginning of Sect. 9.5 below about Einstein’s assessment in a letter to Michele Besso, 12 Dec. 1951.
- 2.
Zeilinger et al. (2005) p. 231.
- 3.
Ibid.; cf. further, e.g., Paul (1985, 1986), Scully and Zubairy (1997), Muthukrishnan et al. (2003), Gerry and Knight (2005) Chaps. 6–10, Chiao and Garrison (2008).
- 4.
Zeilinger et al. (2005) p. 233. Dieter Zeh’s (1993, 2012) propositions are in the same vein.
- 5.
See Walker and Slack (1970) on the conscious linguistic analogy to these neologisms.
- 6.
Stanley (1996) p. 839; analogously also in Klassen (2011) p. 5.
- 7.
This quote from Heyl (1929), who in turn quoted Sir Oliver Lodge, is used by Stuewer (1975a) p. 331 and in the book title of Wheaton (1983) to capture the deep paradox of wave-particle duality.
- 8.
Jaynes (1973), pp. 48–50. On the career of this teacher at Washington University and adherent of semiclassical theories, see Clark et al. (2000). For the context of QED critics in USA, cf. Bromberg (2006) pp. 243–245, Bromberg (2016). The epistemic differences between classical particles and field quanta are described by Falkenburg in Esfeld (2012) pp. 158–184.
- 9.
Armstrong (1983) p. 104. According to http://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/h-l-armstrong, H.L. Armstrong worked as a “Manhattan Project Veteran” for the Tennessee Eastman Corporation on the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
- 10.
Professor emeritus of physics, at the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, India; cf. https://scholar.google.co.in/citations?user=P4p2LbAAAAAJ&hl=en.
- 11.
Singh (1984) p. 11; for similar counterfactual variants, see Hund (1984), Pessoa (2000).
- 12.
- 13.
On the Compton effect and its significance for the light-quantum hypothesis, see Sect. 5.2; on Bothe and Geiger (1924), see p. 128ff. above. On the Raman effect, a molecular scattering of electromagnetic radiation in UV, IF and visible light, which Chandrasekhar V. Raman (1888–1970) himself interpreted as the “optical analogue of the Compton effect,” see Raman (1930) p. 270.
- 14.
Dempster and Batho (1927) p. 644.
- 15.
See the developments discussed in Sect. 8.1 above.
- 16.
Paul (1985) p. 175, furthermore ibid., p. 179 on the photon as a “hybrid” (Zwitter), or on p. 11 about the “complicated structure, [...] a Janus-faced something that—depending on the kind of experimental conditions—‘shows’ itself one time as a corpuscle and another time as a wave.” Han (2014) also stresses this.
- 17.
Heitler (1936b) pp. 63–64, also quoted by Armstrong (1983) pp. 103–104: “a photon is not a thing to which a position can be simply assigned.” Earliest attempts in this direction include Heisenberg and Pauli (1929) and Landau and Peierls (1930). A thorough survey of the literature is offered by Keller (2005), a clear derivation is in Duncan (2012) pp. 159–164.
- 18.
Landau and Peierls (1931) p. 64; furthermore Bohr and Rosenfeld (1933), Newton and Wigner (1949), Mandel (1986) pp. 39f. and Keller (2005).
- 19.
Emilio Santos pleads in favor of this interpretation in Roychoudhuri et al. (2008), pp. 163–174.
- 20.
This is the view of the mathematician R.M. Kiehn in Roychoudhuri et al. (2008), pp. 251–270.
- 21.
Babaei and Mustafazadeh (2017) p. 1.
- 22.
See Muthukrishnan et al. (2003) S-24: “discrete excitation of the electromagnetic field in some cavity”.
- 23.
Strnad (1986a) p. 650. The same point is raised by Gerry and Knight (2005) p. 18, Han (2014) pp. 47ff., Passon and Grebe-Ellis (2016) pp. 20ff., among many other quantum field theoreticians.
- 24.
Newton and Wigner (1949) p. 405; cf. Duncan (2012) pp. 159–164 on “local fields, non-localizable particles!” For a recent effort to construe localized states of the photon cf. Babaei and Mustafazadeh (2017).
- 25.
Strnad (1986a) p. 650. On pedagogically motivated oversimplifications, see Chap. 6 above.
- 26.
See, e.g., Redhead and Teller (1992), French (2015) as well as Lyre in Friebe et al. (2015) Chap. 3.
- 27.
- 28.
Further literature on genuine single-photon experiments since 1996 are cited by Santori et al. (2002), Zeilinger (2005).
- 29.
Paul (1986) p. 221.
- 30.
See Sect. 8.5 above and additionally Paul (1985) pp. 98–123.
- 31.
See Purcell (1956) (cf. Sect. 8.1) as well as Panarella, resp., Roychoudhuri et al. (2008) pp. 111–128 resp. 397–410.
- 32.
Felix Frank: The shortest artificial light burst in history, posted on 2 July 2012, on line at http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-shortest-artificial-light-bursts-in-history (accessed 19 Mar. 2016).
- 33.
For details, see Goulielmakis (2004), Frank et al. (2012), esp. pp. 19–20.
- 34.
Wolfgang Pauli in a letter to Werner Heisenberg, 9 Oct. 1926, in Meyenn, ed. (1979/85) vol. 1, doc. 143, p. 340; cf. Heisenberg (1927), Landau and Lifschitz (1947/73) 6th ed., pp. 44–47, 152–158, Paul (1985) pp. 33–37.
- 35.
See Sect. 1.3, especially on the concept of convolutions.
- 36.
Scully and Sargent (1972) p. 38. In 1997, Scully arrived at other conclusions in a textbook on quantum optics (see below). On Scully’s vita and research context, cf. Bromberg (2006) pp. 245ff.
- 37.
Wheeler during the 72nd ‘Enrico Fermi’ summer school, published 1979, quoted here from Roychoudhuri and Roy (2003) S28. Another formulation in the same vein is also the title of the contribution by K. Michielsen, Th. Lippert and H. de Raedt in Roychoudhuri et al. (2015): “Mysterious quantum Cheshire cat: an illusion.”
- 38.
See Freeman (1984) p. 11 resp. Lamb (1995) p. 77.
- 39.
Oliver Passon in an email to Klaus Hentschel, 2 Sep. 2016; cf. in a similar direction Simonsohn (1979), Lamb (1995) p. 80, and Sulcs (2003) p. 367.
- 40.
See, e.g., McEvoy (2010), Chang (2011) and further literature cited there.
- 41.
See, e.g., Gell-Mann and Ne’eman (1964), Walker and Slack (1970) and Johnson (1999) on semantic modifications of this concept with attributes like ‘color,’ ‘flavor,’ masses, etc.
- 42.
Al F. Kracklauer in: Roychoudhuri et al. (2008) pp. 143–154.
- 43.
While I was writing these lines, six of these proceedings volumes were available to me, each with many dozens of contributions, although many of them range from the highly speculative to downright obscure toying around with ideas. See Roychoudhuri (2015) eds. or http://spie.org/Publications/Proceedings/Volume/9570 for the latest volume in this series.
- 44.
All foregoing quotes from Wayne (2009) p. 23, who offers a detailed survey.
- 45.
On the interpretation of relativity and quantum theory in a fictionalist perspective, cf. Zeh (2012) and Hentschel (2014a).
- 46.
Bonmot by Glauber at the summer school in Les Houches 1963, quoted as the motto to the paper by Holger Mack and Wolfgang Schleich in Roychoudhuri and Roy (2003) S28.
- 47.
This time quoting Glauber from the contribution by Scully et al. in Roychoudhuri and Roy, eds. (2003) S18.
- 48.
Ibid. and in Scully and Zubairy (1997) Chaps. 1 and 21, Grangier (2005) or Zeilinger (2005).
- 49.
Quoted from S.A. Rashkoskiy’s abstract in Roychoudhuri et al. (2015).
- 50.
Quotes from Muthukrishnan, Scully and Zubairy (2003) S24–S25, thereby explicitly withdrawing earlier contrary claims in Scully and Sargent (1972).
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Hentschel, K. (2018). What is Today’s Mental Model of the Photon?. In: Photons. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95252-9_9
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