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Configurations and Amplitude — LessWrong

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So the universe isn’t made of little billiard balls, and it isn’t made of crests and troughs in a pool of aether… Then what is the stuff that stuff is made of? In Figure 1, we see, at A, a half-silvered mirror, and two photon detectors, Detector 1 and Detector 2. Early scientists, when they ran experiments like this, became confused about what the results meant. They would send a photon toward the half-silvered mirror, and half the time they would see Detector 1 click, and the other half of the time they would see Detector 2 click. The early scientists—you’re going to laugh at this—thought that the silver mirror deflected the photon half the time, and let it through half the time. Ha, ha! As if the half-silvered mirror did different things on different occasions! I want you to let go of this idea, because if you cling to what early scientists thought, you will become extremely confused. The half-silvered mirror obeys the same rule every time. If you were going to write a computer progr

x Configurations and Amplitude — LessWrong Quantum Physics and Many Worlds Quantum Mechanics Physics World Modeling Personal Blog 79 Configurations and Amplitude by Eliezer Yudkowsky 11th Apr 2008 12 min read 361 79 So the universe isn’t made of little billiard balls, and it isn’t made of crests and troughs in a pool of aether… Then what is the stuff that stuff is made of? In Figure 1, we see, at A , a half-silvered mirror, and two photon detectors, Detector 1 and Detector 2. Early scientists, when they ran experiments like this, became confused about what the results meant. They would send a

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