Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

A few of the "I'd rather starve and do what I love than work some bullshit job people":

You can't get more direct than this in terms of proving that photons exist!

The particular case of the double-slit experiment will be discussed at: single particle double slit experiment.

Production:

Detectors are generally called photomultipliers:

Bibliography:

Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics, Bose-Einstein statistics and Fermi-Dirac statistics all describe how energy is distributed in different physical systems at a given temperature.

For example, Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics describes how the speeds of particles are distributed in an ideal gas.

The temperature of a gas is only a statistical average of the total energy of the gas. But at a given temperature, not all particles have the exact same speed as the average: some are higher and others lower than the average.

For a large number of particles however, the fraction of particles that will have a given speed at a given temperature is highly deterministic, and it is this that the distributions determine.

One of the main interest of learning those statistics is determining the probability, and therefore average speed, at which some event that requires a minimum energy to happen happens. For example, for a chemical reaction to happen, both input molecules need a certain speed to overcome the potential barrier of the reaction. Therefore, if we know how many particles have energy above some threshold, then we can estimate the speed of the reaction at a given temperature.

The three distributions can be summarized as:

A good conceptual starting point is to like the example that is mentioned at The Harvest of a Century by Siegmund Brandt (2008).

Consider a system with 2 particles and 3 states. Remember that:

Therefore, all the possible way to put those two particles in three states are for: