Can Photo Sensors Help Us Understand the Intrinsic Differences Between Quantum and Classical Statistical Behaviors?
Chandrasekhar Roychoudhuri, Luigi Accardi, Guillaume Adenier +5 more
We use the following epistemology—understanding and visualizing the invisible processes behind all natural phenomena through iterative reconstruction and/or refinement of current working theories towards their limits, constitute our best approach towards discovering actual realities of nature followed by new break‐through theories. We use this epistemology to explore the roots of statistical nature of the real world—classical physics, quantum physics and even our mental constructs. Diversity is a natural and healthy outcome of this statistical nature. First, we use a two‐beam superposition experiment as an illustrative example of the quantum world to visualize the root of fluctuations (or randomness) in the photo electron counting statistics. We recognize that the fluctuating weak background fields make the quantum world inherently random but the fluctuations are still statistically bounded, indicating that the fundamental laws of nature are still causal. Theoreticians will be challenged for ever to construct a causal and closed form theory free of statistical randomness out of incomplete information. We show by analyzing the essential steps behind any experiment that gaps in the information gathered about any phenomenon is inevitable. This lack of information also influences our personal epistemologies to have “statistical spread” due to its molecular origin, albeit bounded and constrained by the causally driven atomic and molecular interactions across the board. While there are clear differences in the root and manifestation of classical and quantum statistical behavior, on a fundamental level they originate in our theories due to lack of complete information about everything that is involved in every interaction in our experiments. Statistical nature of our theories is a product of incomplete information and we should take it as an inevitable paradigm.
AIP conference proceedings•Jan 1, 2009•5 citations