The essence of the scientific method is that it is based on being able to repeat results. If you get the same results every time you do the same operation, and when anyone else who repeats it get the same result, you can safely conclude that you have a scientific explanation. But quantum mechanics says no, you have to assume everything happens with a probability but not with a 100% certainty. It's always statistical only. The two views are not compatible. Now that gives us a problem, because QM breaks science. Yet physicists tell us that QM is real. Basically they are implying we cannot trust science anymore. I realized this tonight when I realized that quantum connectivity might mean that sympathetic magic might have a real basis, but would be very hard to prove as it would be probabilistic in operation. Holy smoke. Might we want to rethink parts of old-time magic after all? Something to ponder.
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I don't view a photon a as a hard little ball.
I view it more like a boat and wake going through the water --- except the boat itself is a tangled wave.
When you "destroy" a particle ---- you just untangle the wave.
It's a wave packet with a spread, but the thing is, experiments with the two-slit mechanism provably show that while single photons end up at statistically random positions in the target plane, streams over time of single photons repeatably accumulate in wave patterns, and these patterns show that single photons pass through both slots and on the other side interfere with themselves.
In my old copy of Griffiths introductory book on QM, second edition figure 1-4 from a Hitachi CRL experiment clearly shows the single-photon behavior weirdness. The photons are not little hard balls, but they are single objects, where each object is a wave packet, which is a fuzzy little ball-ish thing.