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Comment by tristanj | Hacker News Reader

Article is from 1996.

Another study was done last year and they also found humans can probably see single photons, though the study is limited as its sample size is n=3.

https://www.nature.com/news/people-can-sense-single-photons-...

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That Nature article and the OP are in complete agreement. Neither say humans can visually experience single photons.

That's not the actual paper. This is: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12172

A low subject count is a big problem in a lot of psych studies, but much less so in psychophysics. They typically do thousands of trials on each subject and the variance between subjects is usually extremely small.

> can probably see single photons

Photons don't exist in the first place. Science has moved on and modern models don't assume the existence of actual particles. It's only electromagnetic waves.

How do the waves have inertia then? We know for a fact that photons exert force in the surface they strike

That's not quite right, They still come in descrete packets. It makes sense to call these photons and I've been told it's better to just think of them using statistics rather than to use something like waves or particals.

Not that I understand quantum mechanics.

"Science has moved", "Photons don't exist".

How do you live with that?

Ok, tell that to the Standard Model. [1]

Like it or not, in modern physics, "photon" refers to a particular type of discrete lump of momentum and energy. It is a thing you can definitely have one of.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model

Then its not a particle with zero mass as often defined.

They ran each subject for 2400 trials. Was that decided in advance? This really needs a registered replication.

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