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Reading A Wave
Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar

"Taking the pattern of the waves as model, the beach thrusts into the water some faintly hinted points, prolonged in submerged
sandy shoals, shaped and destroyed by the currents at every tide. Mr. Palomar has chosen one of these low tongues of sand as his
observation point, because the waves strike it on either side, obliquely, and, overrunning the half-submerged surface, they meet
their opposites. So, to understand the composition of a wave, you have to consider these opposing thrusts, which are to some extent
counterbalanced and to some extent added together, to produce a general shattering of thrusts and counterthrusts in the usual
spreading of foam."

A wave is fascinating to observe, both as a physical phenomenon and as a mathematical one. When two waves overlap one another, their amplitudes are
added at each point to determine what the amplitude (height) of the resulting wave will be. The pattern that is produced is called an interference pattern.

The double-slit experiment was first performed by Thomas Young in 1805 to demonstrate the wave nature of light. In this experiment, light from two
coherent sources interacts to produce an interference pattern on a screen some distance away. Light and dark bands appear, representing constructive and
destructive interference, respectively. Constructive interference occurs when the difference in distance from the two sources to the observation point is
some integer multiplied by the wavelength (distance between two valleys or two troughs in a wave) of the light. Destructive interference occurs when this
difference is a half integer multiplied by the wavelength.

The double-slit experiment has two major implications for quantum mechanics. First, the experiment can be replicated using electron or neutron sources
instead of light sources, proving the concept of particle-wave duality that is central to quantum mechanics. Secondly, when the experiment is performed by
shooting one photon (particle of light) at a time through the slits, they can be detected individually on the screen, but they accumulate to produce the same
interference pattern. Since they are being fired individually, the photons cannot be interfering with one another—they must be interfering with themselves.
This strange phenomenon is called "single photon interference," and is one of those things that can be understood mathematically but not physically—for
how could one particle possibly travel through both slits?

The most commonly accepted explanation is that the photon acts as a particle once it has been directly detected, and as a wave when it has not. The wave
is a probability function over all space, and so takes into account all possible paths when determining where the photon is likely to end up. When detection
occurs (at the screen), the wave function "collapses," and the photon becomes localized as a particle. The fact that particles have no definite state until
detection is counterintuitive, revolutionary, and very powerful; it is just beginning to be exploited in technologies like quantum computing.
This image is copyrighted © 2004 by Paul Doherty.