How do mirrors reflect single photons?

[stryder]

How we see colour requires certain frequencies of light we don't want to see being absorbed.
A decent mirror has as near to nil trace levels of absorption. Absorption would likely be caused not just by an absorbent material, but how the materials molecular lattice is applied. (Absorption through diffusion)

A mirrors surface lattice therefore would have to be densely packed, but even then there is the question of the angle of it plane in relationship to the light source. (The most reflective mirror is a Dielectric mirror (wikipedia.org))

[C C]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3Egv6iO3dI

"I was incorrectly assuming that the wave is basically only on the main beam, but that's not true. Even for a laser. The light spreads out quite a lot. I know that's hard to visualize, but, and you can see that the light actually spreads out quite far. So really the light here is spreading just like this. And so there's plenty of wave that touches all of these weird bits of the mirror... "

How do you think you could be anywhere but in front of the laser (its very target, IOW) and still see the laser beam at all, if some it was not spreading out in every direction?

[Secular Sanity]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3Egv6iO3dI

"I was incorrectly assuming that the wave is basically only on the main beam, but that's not true. Even for a laser. The light spreads out quite a lot. I know that's hard to visualize, but, and you can see  that the light actually spreads out quite far. So really the light here is spreading just like this. And so there's plenty of wave that touches all of these weird bits of the mirror... "

How do you think you could be anywhere but in front of the laser (its very target, IOW) and still see the laser beam at all, if some it was not spreading out in every direction?

I was thinking the same thing.

[C C]

This video might help in your understanding. 

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Sp5SvdDh2u8

VIDEO EXCERPTS: What happens is that for the motion of a classical object like a baseball, almost all the terms in the sum over paths cancel each other out and add up to nothing all, except one and that's the classical path.

[...] we'll get an incredibly dense array of arrows pointing in all directions around the unit circle, according to Feynman's formula. What we're supposed to do is add up all these arrows for all the different paths [...] when we add them all up they simply cancel each other out and seemingly give us nothing...

[...] But suppose that there's some special trajectory for which the action is approximately constant for it, and for any nearby path. Then the arrows for these trajectories would point in very nearly the same direction and those wouldn't cancel out. Trajectories that are near this special path would add up coherently and survive. Whereas everything else in the sum cancels out. A special path like this ... is called a stationary path, and those are the only contributions that survive...

[confused2]

Looking Glass notes that the interference filter laid over the mirror might be a way to distinguish between light as waves and light as photons. Also pointing out that Feynman insists light is particles while elsewhere lecturing on light as waves. As I see it the complexity (magic?) of photons arises from the ability of a single photon to do everything whole continuous wave does .. but there's only one of it .. statistically it will build up the same image as you'd get with strong illumination which is easy to analyse as waves. If the analysis of a photon predicts something that you wouldn't see with 'waves' then the problem lies with the analysis (or the interpretation of it).

[Secular Sanity]

From Veritaserum:
"When you add up the phases they cancel out. The only exception is the paths that are closest to the path of least action because these paths are at a minimum. They point in the same direction. They constructively interfere and that’s why those are the paths that we see. Light explores all possible paths but the ones we end up seeing constructively interferes and those are the paths of least action."

In Mithuna's experiment, she points out how the light from a laser still spreads out. In Casper’s experiment, I really couldn’t tell how far away from the edge he was.

I tried it but I had to improvise. I have black paper and R/B/G lasers, but no diffraction foil, so I used the back of an old CD. It worked just as good, but I had to have the laser next to the edge of the black paper like she did.

In this experiment, the diffraction foil cancels out the paths that normally interfere with one another, right?

Very interesting! Thanks for posting it, C2!