This book shines bright light into the dim recesses of quantum theory, where the mysteries of entanglement, nonlocality, and wave collapse have motivated some to conjure up multiple universes, and others to adopt a "shut up and calculate" mentality. After an extensive and accessible introduction to quantum mechanics and its history, the author turns attention to his transactional model. Using a quantum handshake between normal and time-reversed waves, this model provides a clear visual picture explaining the baffling experimental results that (...) flow daily from the quantum physics laboratories of the world. To demonstrate its powerful simplicity, the transactional model is applied to a collection of counter-intuitive experiments and conceptual problems. (shrink)

Institute of Theoretical Astronomy, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK 3fS. received 28th August 1970, in final revised form 1st July 1971..

The problem of the direction of electromagnetic time, i.e., the complete dominance of retarded electromagnetic radiation over advanced radiation in the universe, is considered in the context of a generalized form of the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory in an open expanding universe with a singularity atT=0. It is shown that the application of a four-vector reflection boundary condition at the singularity leads to the observed dominance of retarded radiation; it also clarifies the role of advanced and retarded waves in the emission (...) of very weakly absorbed radiation such as neutrinos. (shrink)

Alternate View Column AV-90 Keywords: quantum mechanics nonlocality Wheeler delayed choice eraser interferometer retroactive action Published in the June-1998 issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine ; This column was written and submitted 12/17/97 and is copyrighted ©1997 by John G. Cramer. All rights reserved. No part may be reproduced in any form without the explicit permission of the author.

A recent ontological variant of Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation, called “Possibilist Transactional Interpretation” or PTI, is extended to the relativistic domain. The present interpretation clarifies the concept of ‘absorption,’ which plays a crucial role in TI (and in PTI). In particular, in the relativistic domain, coupling amplitudes between fields are interpreted as amplitudes for the generation of confirmation waves (CW) by a potential absorber in response to offer waves (OW), whereas in the nonrelativistic context CW are taken as generated with certainty. (...) It is pointed out that solving the measurement problem requires venturing into the relativistic domain in which emissions and absorptions take place; nonrelativistic quantum mechanics only applies to quanta considered as ‘already in existence’ (i.e., ‘free quanta’), and therefore cannot fully account for the phenomenon of measurement, in which quanta are tied to sources and sinks. (shrink)

The plane of the present is a concept that is useful for discussing the various paradigms of time. Here by ‘plane of the present’ we mean the temporal interface that represents the present instant and that forms the boundary between the past and the future. We use the geometrical term ‘plane’ to indicate an extended surface in the space-time continuum, as opposed to a ‘point’ on some time axis. This point/plane dichotomy is intended to raise issues of extension and simultaneity (...) and to examine the degree to which these are meaningful concepts from various physical viewpoints. We will show by example in the present work that the plane of the present is a pivotal concept that offers considerable power in differentiating between various views of the nature of time. The concept of time within the main stream of physics thinking has followed a rather convoluted path over the past three millennia. Anticipating the modern motion picture, Zeno of Elea (c.490-c.430 B.C) questioned whether time should appropriately be viewed as a continuously flowing river, or should more properly be considered as a rapid sequence of stop-motion ‘freeze-frames’, in effect rendering geometrical each instant as a separate infinitesimal point on the line of time. Adopting this view, he asked how physical motion could occur. He argued paradoxically that motion is not possible, since it appears to happen only between the frozen frames of time instants.1 From the viewpoint of Zeno, the plane of the present would be simply the last and most recent in this sequence of freeze-frames. It would be that frozen instant, spanning the universe, which changes progressively as the instant we call ‘now’ becomes the frozen past and future possibility freezes into the ‘now’ of present reality. We note that the plane of the present as a concept does not resolve the arrow paradox that Zeno raised. It only provides a way of thinking about it. (shrink)

The attractive feature of the Everett approach is its admirable spirit of approaching the quantum puzzle with a Zen-like "beginner’s mind" in order to try to envision what the pure formalism might be saying about quantum reality, even if that journey leads to a strange place. It is argued that the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics (TI), appropriately interpreted, shares the same motivation and achieves much more, with far fewer conceptual perplexities, by taking into account heretofore overlooked features of the (...) quantum formalism itself (i.e. advanced states). In particular, TI does not need to talk about brain states, consciousness, or observers (rational or otherwise). In its possibilist variant (“PTI”), it shares the realist virtues of treating state vector branches as genuine dynamical entities, without having to explain how or why all of their associated outcomes actually happen (they don’t), how to account for a plenitude of counterpart observers in some coherent notion of trans-temporal identity of the bifurcating observers (observers don’t bifurcate in TI), nor how the certainty of all outcomes could be consistent with any coherent theory of probability, let alone the Born probability (the Born probability emerges naturally in TI). In short, TI is precisely the one-world interpretation Kent is looking for in his (2010). (shrink)