Thought Provoker
Posts: 530
Joined: April 2007
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Hi olegt,
You are getting ahead of me. First Afshar, then GHZ.
I found out about the Afshar experiment by way of Cramer's TIQM while I was debating someone on Telic Thoughts. Here is the Wikipedia description of TIQM...
| Quote | The transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics (TIQM) is an unusual interpretation of quantum mechanics that describes quantum interactions in terms of a standing wave formed by retarded (forward-in-time) and advanced (backward-in-time) waves. The interpretation was first proposed by John G. Cramer in 1986. The author argues that it helps in developing intuition for quantum processes, avoids the philosophical problems with the Copenhagen interpretation and the role of the observer, and resolves various quantum paradoxes.[1][2] Cramer uses TIQM in teaching quantum mechanics at the University of Washington in Seattle.
The existence of both advanced and retarded waves as admissible solutions to Maxwell's equations was proposed by Richard Feynman and John Archibald Wheeler in 1945 (cited in original paper by J. Cramer). They used the idea to solve the problem of the self-energy of an electron. Cramer revived their idea of two waves for his transactional interpretation of quantum theory. While the ordinary Schrödinger equation does not admit advanced solutions, its relativistic version does, and these advanced solutions are the ones used by TIQM.
Suppose a particle (such as a photon) emitted from a source could interact with one of two detectors. According to TIQM, the source emits a usual (retarded) wave forward in time, the "offer wave", and when this wave reaches the detectors, each one replies with an advanced wave, the "confirmation wave", that travels backwards in time, back to the source. The phases of offer an confirmation waves are correlated in such a way that these waves interfere positively to form a wave of the full amplitude in the spacetime region between emitting and detection events, and they interfere negatively and cancel out elsewhere in spacetime (i.e., before the emitting point and after the absorption point). The size of the interaction between the offer wave and a detector's confirmation wave determines the probability with which the particle will strike that detector rather than the other one. In this interpretation, the collapse of the wavefunction does not happen at any specific point in time, but is "atemporal" and occurs along the whole transaction, the region of spacetime where offer and confirmation waves interact. The waves are seen as physically real, rather than a mere mathematical device to record the observer's knowledge as in some other interpretations of quantum mechanics.
John Cramer has argued that the transactional interpretation is consistent with the outcome of the Afshar experiment, while the Copenhagen interpretation and the many-worlds interpretation are not. |
I have learned to take things from Wikipedea with a grain of salt which is why I added the qualifier "If I understand correctly...".
And since you and others are loudly proclaiming I understand nothing, that should have been a dead giveaway.
If you read this description of TIQM it sounds very similar to OR. But instead of "quanglement" going backwards and forwards in time, TIQM has advanced and retarded waves.
Penrose changed the term from "waveform collapse" to "objective reduction" for a reason. I suggest it is because OR doesn't posit a wave-form collapsing into a particle-form. It's all waves. Or more specifically, it's all part of one, giant wavefunction that is our universe.
Chapter 21 of Penrose's The Road to Reality is titled "The quantum particle". It contains figure 21.10 on page 523 that was very revealing to me as an electrical engineer.
As an electrical engineer I am comfortable with looking at things in time domain and frequency domain. A single spike in the time domain is a sine wave in the frequency domain and a single spike in the frequency domain is a sine wave in the time domain.
Penrose explains this is what is happening with the Heisenberg uncertainty relation with position states and momentum states taking the place of time and frequency domains.
Please note that Penrose didn’t refer to time and frequency domains. That is my way of thinking of it. It became clear to me there is no such thing as solid particles, just standing waves in spacetime.
I did some more digging into the Afshar experiment and found there are a lot of people questioning the validity and/or significance of this experiment which I’m not prepared, at this time, to parse out. So, for now, let me modify my statement to be..
“If my understanding is correct, the Afshar experiment supports Penrose’s OR hypothesis just as much or as little as it supports Cramer’s TIQM.”
Which get us to GHZ states…
As I am sure you know, there was a time that physicists where presuming the existence of hidden, local variables that would, someday, become understood. There was hope as long as there was no direct logical inconsistency preventing it. Bell showed the inconsistency. But even so, there was room for doubt because experimental data still relied on probabilities. To me, GHZ state experiments removed all doubt.
For the listening audience…
There is just no way to explain the GHZ states without presuming quantum entanglement across space or time or both.
To me, superluminal communication in four dimensional spacetime inherently means communicating backwards in time as explained in the Penrose quote I provided in the precious comment.
At this point, if you are willing to except GHZ state experiments support the validity of Penrose’s quanglement or visa versa, that is good enough for my purposes (leaving Penrose's OR for later).
We can then move on to Penrose’s view of the universe as a single, multi-dimensional wavefunction.
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