Open System for Geniuses - by Chronostalker

Continue with Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation:

This advanced-retarded handshake is the basis for the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. It is a two-way contract between the future and the past for the purpose of transferring energy, momentum, etc, while observing all of the conservation laws and quantization conditions imposed at the emitter/absorber terminating “boundaries'’ of the transaction. The transaction is explicitly nonlocal because the future is, in a limited way, affecting the past (at the level of enforcing correlations). It also alters the way in which we must look at physical phenomena. When we stand in the dark and look at a star a hundred light years away, not only have the retarded light waves from the star been traveling for a hundred years to reach our eyes, but the advanced waves generated by absorption processes within our eyes have reached a hundred years into the past, completing the transaction that permitted the star to shine in our direction.

So, Cramer is telling us that physics is much like business: the future and the past are signing a contract "for the purpose" of transferring energy, momentum, etc. It is interesting, who is choosing the exact purpose of this contract? Who and how decides whether it is going to be energy transfer or momentum transfer, or something else? The future is "enforcing correlations"? What correlations? What correlations exist between the universe and the universe? It all sounds much like a world salad. But let us wait. Maybe the "future" will bring some correlation between the TI and the reason Our eyes are allowing the star to shine! Unbelievable! But wait, "ours" means "whose?". What about dog’s eyes? What about a piece of dust in the cosmic space? The star is shining on all of them. It is also shining on itself. So what is really responsible for the star shining?

It is a serious interpretational problem for the Copenhagen interpretation that it characterizes as mathematical descriptions of the knowledge of observers the solutions of a simple second-order differential equation relating momentum, mass, and energy. Similarly, it is a problem for the transactional interpretation that it uses advanced solutions of wave equations for retroactive confirmation of quantum event transactions. While this provides the mechanism for its explicit nonlocality, the use of advanced solutions seems counterintuitive and contrary to common sense, if not to causality. Can this account of a quantum event be truly compatible with the austere formalism of quantum mechanics?

Which second order differential equation relates momentum, mass and energy? And again we have "quantum event". The author does not even try to define it.

From one perspective the advanced-retarded wave combinations used in the transactional description of quantum behavior are quite apparent in the Schrodinger-Dirac formalism itself, so much so as to be almost painfully obvious. Wigner’s time reversal operator is, after all, just the operation of complex conjugation, and the complex conjugate of a retarded wave is an advanced wave. What else, one might legitimately ask, could the ubiquitous psi* notations of the quantum wave mechanics formalism possibly denote except that the time reversed (or advanced) counterparts of normal (or retarded) wave functions are playing an important role in a quantum event? What could an overlap integral combining psi with psi* represent other than the probability of a transaction through an exchange of advanced and retarded waves? At minimum it should be clear that the the transactional interpretation is not a clumsy appendage gratuitously grafted onto the formalism of quantum mechanics but rather a description which, after one learns the key to the language, is found to be graphically represented within the quantum wave mechanics formalism itself.

But quantum mechanics is not just Schrodinger-Dirac formalism! There are books about matrix quantum mechanics, and about quantum mechanics in Hilbert space. The real power of quantum mechanics is somewhere else, not in the wave equations, but in the much more general Hilbert space and algebraic formulation. Is the author trying to tell us that in this much more general and powerful applications his idea fails completely? Wigner’s time reversal is NOT just the operation of complex conjugation. I am sure Cramer knows it perfectly, but he chooses to forget it right now. How time reversal is implemented (if it is implemented at all) depends on the representation. There infinitely many possible representations. The whole book by Dirac is about representations. We can have position, momentum, energy, and all kinds of mixed representations - which we select according to the problem at hand. The form of a particular operator (time reversal, for instance) depends on the chosen representation (that is an orthonormal "bases" in the Hilbert space). In this more general approach psi* is an element of a different Hilbert space - the dual space. Therefore psi and psi* never meet! They live in different worlds!

To be continued…

USA is going downhill faster and faster. Reuters brings the most alarming news today: USA is telling the world what “freedom” means when interpreted

Last Update: Monday, April 25, 2005. 9:40am (AEST)
US incarceration rate climbs

The US penal system, the world’s largest, maintained its steady growth in 2004,
the US Department of Justice reported.

The latest official half-yearly figures found the nation’s prison and jail
population at 2,131,180 in the middle of last year, an increase of 2.3 per cent
over 2003.

The United States has incarcerated 726 people per 100,000 of its population,
seven to 10 times as many as most other democracies.

The rate for England is 142 per 100,000, for France 91 and for Japan 58.

The figures issued by the department’s statistical unit showed that 12.6 per
cent of black males in their late 20s were behind bars.

The comparable rate for Hispanic males was 3.6 per cent and for whites 1.7 per
cent.

“Unless we promote alternatives to prison, the nation will continue to lead the
world in imprisonment,” said Jason Ziedenberg, executive director of the Justice
Policy Institute, a think-tank that studies prison issues.

According to the Justice Department, violent crime in the United States fell by
over 33 per cent from 1994 to 2003 and property crimes fell by 23 per cent.

Yet the prison population has continued to climb, increasing an annual average
of 3.5 per cent since 1995, partly due to high recidivism.

Within three years of their release, two of every three prisoners are back
behind bars.

Criminologists attribute the growth in the prison population to “get tough on
crime” policies that have subjected hundreds of thousands of non-violent drug
and property offenders to long mandatory sentences.

“We have to be concerned about an overloaded system which sentences many
offenders quickly and is not doing a good job of sorting out people who should
be incarcerated from people for whom other responses would produce better, less
expensive results,” said Malcolm Young, executive director of the Sentencing
Project, a Washington think-tank.

The rise in the prison population varies by state.

Since 1998, 12 states experienced stable or declining incarceration rates but
crime rates in those states declined at the same rate as in the other 38.

Texas, with 704 per 100,000 people in state prisons, incarcerates almost seven
times as many as Maine, at 149 per 100,000.

It costs around $22,000 to lock up one person for a year.

The United States spends about $57 billion annually on its prison and jail
system.

Women remain the fastest-growing segment of the prison population, increasing by
2.9 per cent over the year to over 103,000.

In 1980, the United States imprisoned 12,000 women.

In addition, the United States jails around 283,000 people with serious mental
illnesses and almost 92,000 foreigners.

This country is bringing the world to destruction. In science the situation is deteriorating as well, though not with the same speed. Not yet. A quote from Peter Woit blog:

Peter, it looks like there are two seperate issues here:

1) Emminent scientists with proven track records are attempting to think deeply about speculative ideas which appear completely crazy to others. Some, like Weinberg, even had the temerity to make an experimental prediction based on anthropic reasoning. Others, like Arkani-Hamed and Dimopolous, are continuing this ridiculous trend, making assumptions and following the reasoning through to extract experimental predictions from fine-tuning scenarios.

This abandonment of science from some of its leading stars is appalling. People simply shouldn’t consider these ideas as it’s obvious that they’re wrong and won’t lead anywhere.

2) Other leading scientists, like Dyson and Vilenkin, are receiving money from templeton, an organisation which clearly has an agenda that many of us disagree with. While there’s no suggestion that templeton is dictating the research of these people, it’s disgusting that they would accept the money, especially in the current climate where the DOE are showering departments with funds.