Thanks for this detailed write-up. I guess I struggle more with the particle aspect than the wave aspect. Meaning, if light were exclusively a wave, then the half-silvered mirror doesn't 'randomly' either reflect or pass through, it just splits the beam in two. And all the events described above would make sense - the beam splits at each half-silvered mirror, so if the block is in place you get hits at B, and if not, you don't. (Correct?)
Except that we are somehow convinced that we are sending single, indivisible photons. Why is that?
And in general - I assume these experiments have actually been done, i.e. at some point long ago someone tried this and was surprised to see that the interference happened with individual photons. Is there a write up of one of these experiments somewhere?
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Thanks for this detailed write-up. I guess I struggle more with the particle aspect than the wave aspect. Meaning, if light were exclusively a wave, then the half-silvered mirror doesn't 'randomly' either reflect or pass through, it just splits the beam in two. And all the events described above would make sense - the beam splits at each half-silvered mirror, so if the block is in place you get hits at B, and if not, you don't. (Correct?)
Except that we are somehow convinced that we are sending single, indivisible photons. Why is that?
And in general - I assume these experiments have actually been done, i.e. at some point long ago someone tried this and was surprised to see that the interference happened with individual photons. Is there a write up of one of these experiments somewhere?