*** UNDER CONSTRUCTION! ***
But for now…
08/19/04
Response to W Unruh
Unruh has suggested a “simpler version” of my experiment, in which Complementarity survives. His reasoning is fallacious. As an analogy, one can argue that a “simpler” airplane can be constructed by removing the wings, however, naturally this “simpler” version would be incapable of flight. Similarly Unruh’s thought experiment is certainly simpler than my experimental setup, but one cannot blame it for not performing the same feat: it is an inherently different experiment!
In short, the source of Unruh’s error is the commonly-sited assumption of an exact one-to-one correlation between Mach-Zehnder and double-slit interferometers… I suggest that he addresses the actual experiment I have performed and calculate the expected results on whether the “which-way” information (“which-slit” information for a double-slit welcher-Weg experiment) is destroyed by the presence of the wires, rather than discuss his version.
Also, see my Weblog and Wikipedia entry for more discussion on Unruh and a recent paper by Kastner.
Shahriar S. Afshar © 2004-2005