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If you consider the dark spots on the pattern produced by the double slit experiment to maybe be a shadow of the slitless area of the dividing wall between and around the slits, as silly a thought as that might be, leads one to consider how that would be testable.

What happens in the experiment when one of the slits is slanted just slightly?

Do the slants manifest in the results on the backdrop?

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Yes, most certainly the shape of each slit affects the diffraction and interference patterns. I admit up front to being too lazy to write out the generalized solution, but if you grab any decent optics text, you'll get the integral formulas for the patterns as a function of slit shape. Qualitatively, you can see that a 'slanted' single slit will produce a "rotated" version of the single-slit diffraction pattern. The two-slit pattern (one straight, the other slanted) could be thought of as a combination of several two-slit patterns, each with a different separation (chop the slits into slice pairs). After that, too much math for this early in the century :-)

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Take - if you want - in your mind the fact that even a edge interact with a light source (a monochromatic point source give the best results) by the way that you could see fringes on a display behind the edge. So you have to ask why there is an area between shadow an "no shadow" which contains fringes. The answer is: Because the interaction between the light's photons and the edges's electrons is quantitized and that lead to the dark (no photons on the screen) - bright (arrivel of photons on the screen and this with twice the intensity so that in sum approx. all photons arrive on the screen) - pattern on the screen.

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  • $\begingroup$ How do you figure that? The pattern is easily analyzed with purely wavelike arguments; in any case you don't seem to have addressed the question at hand. $\endgroup$
    – Carl Witthoft
    Sep 23, 2014 at 12:55
  • $\begingroup$ "The wave theory of light, which operates with continuous spatial functions, has worked well in the representation of purely optical phenomena and will probably never be replaced by another theory....In accordance with the assumption to be considered here, the energy of a light ray spreading out from a point source is not continuously distributed over an increasing space but consists of a finite number of energy quanta which are localized at points in space, which move without dividing, and which can only be produced and absorbed as complete units." A.Einstein 1905 (bold from me) $\endgroup$
    – HolgerFiedler
    Sep 24, 2014 at 17:55
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    $\begingroup$ That's very nice and still not relevant. The slit neither absorbs nor produces photons. $\endgroup$
    – Carl Witthoft
    Sep 24, 2014 at 18:51

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