I’m reading on the basics of the Wheeler Cosmic Delayed choice experiment where a Photon travels from a far light source to earth & takes two paths around a Large Galaxy.
The Galaxy sits in between the light source & Earth.
I can’t see at all how the Photon can take two paths as a wave through the entire journey around the galaxy to earth, like it would from a beam splitter or slits. As Gravity’s influence will begin gradually & the distance is enormous.
I keep thinking long before it even got close to the galaxy it would have collapsed into a single path.
It might help to remember that, from a photon’s “perspective”, time doesn’t exist. But also, remember that our wave model and particle models are just that – models. The photon isn’t really a little ball and it’s not really a little wave. Or, rather, there is no actual macro analogy for what a photon is. It’s a photon, which is not something your intuition is familiar with.
True, but not really helpful here, because time does still exist for all of the miscellaneous junk between that other galaxy and here that the photon might potentially interact with.
…and the lensing would still happen for an electron, moving at less than light speed.
I don’t see any reason to think that the gravitational lensing is any harder to accept than the two-slit experiment. It’s the same thing, the only difference is that it’s bigger.
I don’t see how they are the same at all. The two slits are comparable to the lights wavelength. Where as the lensing is just empty space & the gravity gradually builds up.
maybe I’m missing something big, if so please help.
it’s not relevant to your understanding, but I have to point out that in the two-slit experiment, neither the width of the slits nor their separation are comparable to the wavelength of light. Slit width and separations are typically 1,000 times the wavelength of light. What’s important is that the path length difference between the two slits to the observation point is less than the coherence length of the light, which for run-of-the-mill sources is typically a few wavelengths of light.
I don’t see how they’re different, so I’m not sure where to start to clear things up. The key points of the two-slit experiment are that there are two (or more) paths that the particle (not just a photon, but any particle) can take, and if we just measure where it ended up but not which path it took, we see patterns that indicate that its probability-wave took BOTH paths.
The setup is usually done so that the wavelength and distances makes the interference patterns obvious, but that’s just a measurement convenience. The fundamentals of having two paths is still the same even if those two paths go around a galaxy.
And I don’t know what to make of your comment that gravity “gradually builds up.” What do you mean by that?