People can sense single photons
I&#x27;m honestly a bit surprised that such an article is placed in Nature, as there seem to be a couple questionable details in the article regarding the experiment:<p>- Only 3 volunteers on which the experiment has been tested<p>- The volunteers were left &quot;in total darkness for around 40 minutes&quot; before the actual experiment<p>- &quot;In many cases, they got it wrong; this is to be expected, given that more than 90% of photons that enter the front of the eye never even reach a rod cell, because they are absorbed or reflected by other parts of the eye. Still, participants were able to answer correctly more frequently than would be expected if they had guessed at random and their confidence level was higher when they were right.&quot;<p>- The three volunteers sat through a total of more than 2,400 trials in which a single photon was emitted (and many more in which it was not).<p>- That high volume of testing, the researchers say, gives them strong statistical evidence of single-photon detection<p>- The participants had to say on which occasion they thought they saw a photon, and how confident they were (on a scale of 1 to 3) about their sighting.<p>In summation, they put 3 volunteers for 40 minutes in total darkness, then performed more than 2400 trials in total (i assume 1000+ trials per person, taking into account the tests in which no photon was emmitted). &quot;Many&quot; times the volunteers guessed wrong, but when they guessed right they were pretty confident of it (using a rather simplistic scale of 1-3).<p>What I&#x27;m seeing with this experiment is a result which is more confirmed due to psychological bias rather than actual results by putting these volunteers in a straining test. How would you, as a volunteer react, if you were left in the darkness for such a long test duration and would asked over a 1000 times whether you have seen a flash.<p>Edit: After having read the actual paper on the methodology, I do retract my comment.