Thanks!

Thanks! Glad you like the analogy 😄

Thanks for the questions! For the first point about experimental single-photon sources and detectors: creating these is technologically challenging, but possible and has been done, so there's now various different ways of creating devices to emit and to detect single photons. One example method of creating single photons uses "spontaneous parametric down conversion": we direct a beam of high-energy photons at a specialised crystal, and then a spontaneous process in the crystal causes it to emit a pair of lower-energy photons. Only a small number of photons in the high-energy beam are converted into low-energy pairs, so the output photons get emitted one pair at a time. Detecting one photon from the pair signals the presence of the other photon, which you can then use for single-photon experiments. For the second point: I indeed don't think that we need to view a photon as a "point-like particle" (though that may be a reasonable approximation for some contexts). Understanding decoherence removes the need to imagine the photon as somehow "flipping between being a wave or a particle depending on whether we are watching or not", as we can explain both behaviours in one go using the photon's wave-function and ability to become entangled. It's also worth mentioning: to really understand the physical nature of a photon, we need "quantum field theory" (QFT), which shows us that "particles" are all stable configurations (excitations) of an underlying quantum field. A photon is an excitation of the quantum electromagnetic field. For more on this theme, I recommend Vlatko Vedral's blog post and paper entitled "The Everything-is-a-Quantum-Wave Interpretation of Quantum Physics", both are accessible online.

@@maria_violaris Thanks for your answer!