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…