A couple of thoughts:

Em waves don’t interact directly; only through degradation into pairs (leptons and antileptons, etc.), and so only indirectly. So this is probably not a “clean” test.

So, we still don’t know if they are naturally quantized, or only quantized when interacting with atoms. It may even be that we decide, at some point, to replace “atoms” with a larger category of matter, also quantized.

Thanks for a great comment!

You’ll recall that a year or so ago I asked MacArthur prize winner Shawn Carlson, founder of the Society for amateur scientists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Amateur_Scientists) to set up a forum specifically for the guys I know who love to poke away in theoretical physics.

I know a bunch of you! Nathan Myrhvold, of course, has his union card, having studied under Hawking. But he’s as lively and joyful a crackpot as the best of them. I can also think of Joe Miller of USC (who I’ll link you with separately) and Mark Snoswell, of the Computer Graphics Society. And others. ALas, I don’t think any of you ever actually checked in or joined the SAS forum!

So much for the collegiality of unlicensed quantum mechanics.

Actually, your ruminations on the quantum came to mind when someone raised, once again, the hoary old notion that we haven’t contacted extraterrestrials because “we live in a simulation” and one intelligent species is all that the computert could handle.

Well, well. At one level, that’s becoming a ho-hum, yawner. At another, it remains a wow idea.) But I’ve long been intrigued with the notion that the quantum effects we see are a programmer’s convenience, allowing discrete computational elements to handle discrete packages of simulated data.

As Joe Miller (jdm@hsc.usc.edu put him on your list!) put it:

” I think the problem is resolution! I have been teaching myself some of the fine points of quantum mechanics for some years now, including of course the uncertainty principle. But I never put it in the context of cosmological simulation until someone pointed out to me that since there is according to QM both a minimum quantized spatial distance and a minimum quantal temporal duration, that really defines a pixel (or more appropriately voxel or even more appropriately whatever you call a picture element in a 10 or 11 dimensional space, assuming you accept the holy commandments of string theory!). Anyway, the idea is that if we are living in the One True Universe, why isn’t it analog continuous indefinitely? Why should an omnipotent Creator be limited in this way? So the answer is that the Artist is just some physicist whose computer has limited resolution! And if you go that far, then it is not too much more to say that just simulating one intelligent civilization must eat up a great deal of memory, let alone a Galactic Congress.”

As for your general statement, I agree that the quantization that we observe in most experiments arises because of interaction with atoms, which have energy levels which are, themselves quantized. Hence radiation emitted by atoms will, as well.

Yes, EM radiation can be tuned to emerge as arbitrary frequencies. There are no stepwise quantum allowed vs forbidden energies for EM waves travelling through space… that is, unless the foamlike nature of that space prevents us from seeing interstices and simply skipping over them, in which case it doesn’t matter.

But this does NOT mean that EM waves aren’t “quantal”… in that the interaction of two EM waves, in empty space, will be a quantum interaction. It is not limited to the prim levels defined by an atom. But they will do their own “level sifting” with each other.

Interesting stuff, as always.