So the way I'm going to snap you out of your western/global self-satisfied pathologically dilettante-soaked 'lifestyle' is by quoting and paraphrasing some key Feynman at you, key stuff which shows clearly where the gap lies between truth, as described here by Feynman who, by your own admission, knows more than most of you, and the dogma YOU idiotically believe because you are a numpty and in reality believe the opposite of that which has been taught by 'great men' you like to see yourself as akin to, particularly in contrast to 'some foreign migrant' or 'some taliban' because you have similar physical attributes to people like Einstein - for example the distressingly western way a recent advert for energy companies involves getting a man to sound and look like Einstein, give viewers advice to opt in or buy or whatever, such a telling sales ploy in so many ways, shows so much of what western bias and self-worship truly looks like. Bilko claiming to be a great physicist because he can put on a German accent and wear a wig to look like Einstein.
So let's shatter that dogma - those ignorant numpty beliefs you have o typically western cretinous reader in all but the fewest cases and the latter will forgive my harshness as they too realise you, other readers, are idiots, and many of that few would prefer it if some of you many were not.
(from quantum electrodynamics lectures by feynman, part 1)
<< The theory concerns the properties of light, electrons and the interaction of light and electrons. It's all one theory, I've cut it into three parts that way, and the first thing I'm going to start with is the properties of light. Okay? I will tell you some of the properties of light and I hope if I can do it to get to the key point and then we'll continue in the following lectures to elaborate on it. >>
<< So I'm going to discuss all my phenomena for a while with light of one colour, because it's simpler. The first thing - Newton believed that light was a corpuscular thing and turned out to have very strange properties from that point of view, and it was then explained that many of these strange properties were because it was in fact a wave - which was WRONG, it turned out he was right, it was a particle. It is corpuscular.
The reason that he said it was corpuscular was based on an incorrect guess as to the behaviour of waves and his argument was wrong, logically, but it turned out in the end that it WAS particles. Now how I know it's particles is this: if we make an instrument to detect light that's as sensitive as it can possibly be made - in fact this thing is called a 'photo multiplier' - and that's not the only instrument, I'm just taking one as an example but it doesn't make any difference how we do it.
When we get to light that's sufficiently weak, an instrument to detect it hears clicks, pulses, as if it was rain falling on something, where you get bang, bang, bang, bang. When the light is bright the rain goes bangbangbang, bangbangbang - a lot of them. When the light is very dim: boom, boom, boom, boom, small. These particular boomp, boomps, and bang bang bangs and so forth are completely out of proportion. The actual rate is enormous, okay, and a little bit less when there's less light. It's very difficult to get it to a boomp, boomp, boomp - it'd be so dark in here you wouldn't know what --- [mumbles, audience laughs].
But this device, to show you an example of how it works, just so you understand, what happens when we detect the weakest possible light - is it works like this, there's a metal plate here made of caesium or something, when light shines on it it knocks an electron out, then you have another plate here with a voltage that attracts the electron so the electron [..] speeds up and hits this plate. When it hits this plate it has about a hundred volts of energy, it splatters, other electrons get knocked out, two or three, five perhaps, on the average, and those are attracted to another plate, and they all go sailing down here with another hundred volts, five of them this time, and each one of those knocks out on the average five or six other electrons, now I've got twenty five, and that's attracted to another plate and that hits those and so on and you have maybe ten or a dozen plates, by the time you get out the other end [..] it's significantly amplified.
What happens when we have a device like this and we put it in the dark is it goes click click click, click click click, every once in a while - a light particle comes in, a photon. This is a particle in every sense, the experiments have all the right properties, as follows: that if you have a very weak light and there's one of them every once in a while, if you put two cells out, and there's just a few of them coming then it goes on one or the other, they don't go off together - if they go off together then there's too many coming and you can't resolve it but if it's very weak the particle's either here or there, and it comes in particles.
I don't know how much I can emphasise this especially to young students who have learned it's waves, it is particles in every way, whenever you can detect it [..] if we were ten times more sensitive to light then in the dark we would see little tiny flashes, little tiny dots of light. [..] But the human eye is not quite that sensitive and it takes five or six of these photons to make one nerve fibre go off, so we cannot detect with the eye light quite low enough to notice the fact that it comes in the form of raindrops. [..] You can detect them with an instrument [..] bright light, more per second, dim light less per second. >>
<< The next property I want to talk about is reflection, from a glass surface or a water surface. [..] You look at a window you can see through it but also some reflection. Now already there's a problem: because the light that's reflected is not as intense as the light that's shining - some of the light goes through the window, say, or through the water, down in. Only some of the light comes back. If the light is headed for water, for example, straight down, only about 4% reflects. [..] That means that if we had our photon counter [..] light's coming down, and some of it's reflected [..] and we find what? How can it be partly reflected? [..] When you have light of a definite colour, the energy that the first one knocks out is always the same, each particle is the same [..] it's a full photon. [..] So, of a hundred that come down, perhaps four go back and ninety six go through [..] what determines which four? How does which one of the hundred know whether it'll come back up or not? [..] So the situation is that the phenomenon is probabilistic. It takes odds. It comes down and has a four percent chance (of reflecting) [..]
How can it be probabilistic? Suppose that I have a light so weak that I have only one photon coming every few minutes, will the counter catching it if it reflects go off or the one under the water? One out of twenty five times the one catching reflections goes off. Which time? What determines that? Possible theories. Nothing. Pure chance. The world is made of chance. [audience laugh] That would mean that physicists can't predict the future, it would mean that if you set up an experiment with exact conditions you cannot predict what happens in the future because you can't predict whether it's going to go up or it's going to go down, you just have four percent odds, your whole beautiful structure of science is reduced to computing odds, nature instead of being definite does everything by chance [..]
The photons are all identical and they behave with four percent. Are we therefore reduced to this horror that physics has been reduced [..] to probabilities? Yes we have, that's the situation today. In spite of the fact that philosophers have said {puts on pompous voice} "it is a necessary requirement for science that setting up an experiment exactly similar will produce results exactly the same the second time" - not at all, one out of twenty five it goes up and sometimes it goes down, unpredictable, completely by chance.
I already see you turning off. I see you say you don't understand me. You can't understand that it could be chance. "I don't like it". Tough. (audience laughs). I don't like it either but that's the way it is, okay. I don't understand it either. "It must be that nature knows whether it's going to go up or down". No it is not. >>
{this point to be continued, loads more excellent info from Feynman to come in this spot}