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Re: Quantum question?



I think not, David.

Adam was by constitution and proclivity a scientist; I was the same, and
we loved to call ourselves by that great name...Our first memorable
scientific discovery was the law that water and like fluids run downhill,
not up.
Mark Twain, <Extract from Eve's Autobiography>

On Fri, 28 Jan 2000, David Bowman wrote:
-snip-

could (and often does) define a photon as being the relatively localized
corpusles of propagating electromagnetic energy that are emitted and
absorbed in various quantum transitions that occur by virtue of the
interaction of the Maxwell field with the quantum dynamical system of
interest. These latter-type photons *are* things that one observes in
the lab. These latter-type photons are are of finite extent in space and
time and have a finite width of energy and momentum. Their width in
these parameters is related to the lifetime of the metastable states that
produced them.

-snip-
Please tell me how to measure the width of a single photon, or,
for that matter, its extent in space and time. What photonic process do
you invoke? What instruments do you use?