A room full of light is 'bright' because the light contains so much information. And: it seems amazing that visible light is so faithful (non-noisy) when you think of it as a wave propagating in all directions; only a particle at the moment of observation.
I find that your bright room-observation and an analogy with low-light photography almost helps me grasp how come the world seems classical despite its quantum “underwear”:
Think of a (digital) photograph taken in very low light. Something like this.
Think of being in a pitch black room, and imagine your eyes are perfectly sensitive. You have a flashlight pointed away from you.
Now imagine the flashlight is very dim: it only sends one photon every few seconds, by moving one of its electrons; the electric field propagates at c as a spherical wavefront to “notify the universe” of the change. Whenever this front passes through another electron (say, of the wall before you), it may be absorbed. If it’s not absorbed, the electron does nothing (in a way, it doesn’t care that the first electron changed position). However, if it is absorbed (the two electrons exchanged a photon), then the absorbing electron now changes position to conform to the new information; doing so starts another wave-front communicating this information. Note that this second wave-front is not just going back, it’s still a spherical front starting from the wall electron. Again it starts propagating through space until it hits another electron. Suppose this last electron is used by your eye as a detector. Then you just noticed a tiny “flash” of light somewhere in your vision field.
Note that the two absorptions happen (until now) randomly. If you use just that flashlight you’ll only see random flashes in the room. More precisely, in the many-worlds interpretations, from a single train of emission-absorption-reemission-detection “events”, each you in every world will see the tiny flash in random parts of their vision field. This is both because different wall electrons would have done the absorption-reemission, and because of different electrons in your eyes would do the detection. You can extend this metaphor a bit more: in worlds where the re-emitted photon didn’t hit your eye, but (say) another electron deeper in the wall, that world’s version of you won’t notice anything. (The absorption-reemission chain will just bounce electrons and nuclei randomly throughout the wall, which just means heat.)
OK, here’s the “brightness” part: even though the absorption-reemission electron is randomly chosen by each world, not all of them are equally likely to be chosen. The wave-functions of the particles, and the interactions of those wave-functions as given by QM equations, cause the distribution of “picks” to have a certain “shape”.
Imagine that you take your flash-light and you increase its brightness; say it sends 10, then 100, then a million photons at the same time. You’ll start seeing several flashes, from random positions in your field of vision. (Each of you in the many-worlds will see the flashes coming from different places.) But the wave-function says how likely it is that you’ll see flashes from different places: even if each version of you sees different flashes, each of them will see more flashes coming from bright (white) objects than from dark (black) objects. As a result, you’ll see a grainy image of room in all worlds, even though a different one (that is, with the grain positioned differently) in each. The more photons your flashlight sends, the more “smooth” your image will be, converging on the “shape” of the wave-function. The image above shows a noisy image obtained in low light (although for normal cameras the source of noise is different).
Imagine you take several consecutive photos in those conditions; each image will be very grainy and dim, and the position of grain will vary among your many-world alternates. However, if you combine your successive photos in one, you’ll accumulate a brighter, clearer image (the more so as you add more photos). Each many-world version of you will get a different one, but they’ll converge to the same: the shape of the world’s wave-function. (Of course, the different worlds will eventually diverge in shape, too.)
You can stretch this analogy to visualize all sorts of interactions. For bright objects the re-emission is more likely to occur “towards” the outside of the object (or, inversely, electrons within bright objects tend to not communicate between themselves the news about outside). For dark objects it’s the other way around: photons are more likely to be passed among the object’s electrons rather than towards you.
Or take diffraction: A photon is emitted, passes through a screen with two holes (thus, it’s not absorbed by its electrons), and hits a wall. Even if you send photons one-by-one, they’ll still form a diffraction pattern on the wall. You can imagine it this way: the initial emission (the wave-front carrying the message) is spherical; when it hits the screen, either it’s absorbed (the message was passed to the screen), and you see nothing), or not: the message passed through both holes. But from each hole the message continues to propagate in a sphere centered on that hole. When the “message” hits the detector area, it is both these spheres that hit; depending on the difference in distance of the two paths, in some areas the two “copies” of the message can contradict each other or agree; you’ll have successful detection (a movement of an electron in the detector wall) only where the two copies agree, thus forming the interference pattern—but, for a single photon, exactly what point of the interference pattern will be hit is random.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky, Collapse Postulates
In the olden days of physics, circa 1900, many prominent physicists believed in a substance known as aether. The principle was simple: Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism had shown that light was a wave, and light followed many of the same equations as sound waves and water waves. However, every other kind of wave- sound waves, water waves, waves in springs- needs some sort of medium for its transmission. A "wave" is not really a physical object; it is just a disturbance of some other substance. For instance, if you throw a rock into a pond, you cannot pluck the waves out of the pond and take them home with you in your backpack, because the "waves" are just peaks and troughs in the puddle of water (the medium). Hence, there should be some sort of medium for light waves, and the physicists named this medium "aether".
However, difficulties soon developed. If you have a jar, you can pump the air out of the jar, and then the jar will no longer transmit sound, demonstrating that the wave medium (the air) has been removed. But, there was no way to remove the aether from a jar; no matter what the experimentalists did, you could still shine light through it. There was, in fact, no way of detecting, altering, or experimenting with aether at all. Physicists knew that aether must be unlike all other matter, because it could apparently pass through closed containers made of any substance. And finally, the Michelson-Morely experiment showed that the "aether" was always stationary relative to Earth, even though the Earth changed direction every six months as it moved about in its orbit! Shortly thereafter, the inconsistencies were resolved with Albert Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, and everyone realized that aether was imaginary.
Shortly thereafter, during the 20th century, physicists discovered two new forces of nature: the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. These two forces, as well as electromagnetism, could be described very well on the quantum level: they were created by the influence of mediator particles called (respectively) gluons, W and Z bosons, and photons, and these particles obeyed the laws of quantum mechanics just like electrons and mesons did. The description of these three forces, as well as the particles they act upon, has been neatly unified in a theory of physics known as the Standard Model, which has been our best known description of the universe for thirty years now.
However, gravity is not a part of this model. Making an analogy to the other forces, physicists have proposed a mediator particle known as the "graviton". The graviton is thought to be similar to the photon, the gluon, and the W and Z bosons, except that it is massless and has spin 2. I posit that the "graviton" is essentially the same theory as the "aether": a misguided attempt to explain something by reference to similar-seeming things that were explained in the same way. Consider the following facts:
And, with reference to the graviton itself:
So, what's really going on here? I don't know. I'm not Albert Einstein. But I suspect it will take someone like him- someone brilliant, very good at physics, yet largely outside the academic system- to resolve this mess, and tell us what's really happening.