If that still doesn't work, read an actual book on quantum mechanics. Feynman's QED is a great place to start..
Since I was pretty much lost after the first few posts in this series, this is exactly what I am doing. I've gone through the first 2 chapters, and what has surprised me is that at least one part of it (explaining why light "bends" when it goes through a material with a different refractive index) has been MORE intuitive to me than the "classical" explanation. The explanation (or shall I say, analogy) I have always heard is th...
So you calculate events for photons that happen in parallel (e.g. one photon being deflected while another is deflected as well) the same way you would for when they occur in series (e.g. a photon being deflected, and then being deflected again)? It seems that in both cases you are multiplying the original configuration by -1 (i.e. i * i).
FWIW, my first instinct when I saw the diagram was to assume 2 starting configurations, one for each photon, though I guess the point of this post was that I can't do stuff like that. In fact, when I did the math that way, I came up with the photons hitting different detectors twice as much as when they both hit the same one.
I think I'll be picking up the Feynman book.....
So out of curiosity, how much longer is the cutesy analogy thing going to go on for?