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Thu 17 Nov, 2011 12:45 pm
The set-up: There is a hollow sphere with a perfect and perfectly-mirrored interior, which is also in a vacuum. Somehow, a laser beam is shot into the sphere (it would need to enter it without a hole or anything ruining the mirroring). What does the laser beam do? Would it just keep bouncing around in there forever? If it did just bounce around, I assume that it would destructively and constructively interfere with itself. If so, would there be some sort of build-up of energy or loss of energy. What sort of things need to be taken into account to figure this out?
@tmshaw,
I believe that in a theoretically pure/perfect system, the laser would bounce around in there forever without any loss or gain in energy. It would be a closed system.
But I also think Heiserberg would say that in an unobserved space, all possibilities would exist simultaneously until the system was cracked open and the probabilities collapsed into some singular state.
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