Can You Be In Two Places At Once???

Can you be in two places at once?

Is that possible? I would love to be able to be in two places at once. Not only would it be fantastic to stay in bed and sleep off that one too many you had the night before, while simultaneously being on top form in a lecture that you would have otherwise missed.

But on a more serious note, I have thought about this, I’d like to be able to see more things and be able to witness two moments without having to pick which is going to be the most important. I’ve posed this question to a close friend who took the trouble to explain in a letter how it is actually possible..... Here comes the science bit.....

When you think about light as a collection of photons, the bands created on a screen when you shine a light through a diffraction grating actually represent the statistical probability that a photon will hit that part of the screen.

This is easier to understand if you allow only a few photons through to the slits. If you only have one slit, the screen would look like this:

The photons will hit the screen mostly in the direct line of sight
from the slit. Thus, the probability is higher that a photon will hit
in the direct line of sight of the slit than in places far away from the slit.

If you have two slits, the probability changes because of interference:

A higher concentration of
photons exists at the bands.

But what if you only let one photon at a time go through a two slit grating? You would expect the scatter of photons on the screen to look like the scatter from a one slit grating, since a single photon has nothing to interfere with. After all, if a single photon goes through one slit, how can it "know" that the other slit even exists?

But, to the great surprise of quantum physicists, the scatter of the photons let through one at a time is identical to the scatter of the photons let through all at once! The photon did somehow "know" about the other slit. So which slit does a single photon go through? The answer is the photon goes through both slits at the same time. The photon (according to modern theory) becomes two ghost photons, allowing a single photon to interfere with itself. Hard to imagine? You're in good company.

So if this is actually possible on a tiny scale. Why can’t I be in two places at once! The closest thing I have seen to it so far is a clip from a ‘walk to remember’. A high school American (Mandy Moore) straddles a state line, therefore on a technicality being in two places at once. I know you are thinking this could be easily achieved if I drove to the England -Scotland border yet it lacks the romantic soppy Bridget Jones moment that every die hard romantic craves. That would indeed be me.