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Sophrosyne
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- TL;DR Summary
- Has the speed of light from one point to another been measured to be different for the different paths light can travel between them?
Richard Feynman formulated quantum path integrals to show that a single photon can theoretically travel infinitely many different paths from one point to another. The shortest path, minimizing the Lagrangian, is the one most often traveled. But certainly other paths can be taken. Using single photon emissions, this has indeed been shown to be the case.
But these other paths should take longer to get to the photometer. Has anyone shown that single photons sometimes take longer than the path minimizing the Lagrangian? Shining a bunch of photons from a single source at a single instant, has anyone been able to show that the photons arrive at the photometer not in a single instant, but in a distribution of times reflecting the probabilities of having traveled the different paths?
But these other paths should take longer to get to the photometer. Has anyone shown that single photons sometimes take longer than the path minimizing the Lagrangian? Shining a bunch of photons from a single source at a single instant, has anyone been able to show that the photons arrive at the photometer not in a single instant, but in a distribution of times reflecting the probabilities of having traveled the different paths?
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