Just how dark does it have to be before our eyes stop working? Research by a team from Rockefeller University and the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Austria has shown that humans can detect the presence of a single photon, the smallest measurable unit of light. Previous studies had established that human subjects acclimated to the dark were capable only of reporting flashes of five to seven photons.
I’m not sure. Either they’re unable to completely remove all noise (meaning the rest wasn’t done in absolute 0 photon space, only that when we pulse a photon a person can detect that there was a photon in an otherwise very low photon environment; that is, there may be some 10s of photons, but when the researchers release their control photon from the crystal, it is perceptible above that background), or perhaps they’re talking about neurological noise in the biological circuits that fire. My guess is the former.
I’m not sure. Either they’re unable to completely remove all noise (meaning the rest wasn’t done in absolute 0 photon space, only that when we pulse a photon a person can detect that there was a photon in an otherwise very low photon environment; that is, there may be some 10s of photons, but when the researchers release their control photon from the crystal, it is perceptible above that background), or perhaps they’re talking about neurological noise in the biological circuits that fire. My guess is the former.