[extropy-chat] AAAS conference on retrocausation

[The Avantguardian]

--- Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> A physicist friend pointed out to me that Cramer's
> interpretation is 
> perhaps less plausible than Bohm's quantum
> potential, where the 
> photon 'senses' the environment nonlocally. For all
> I know, she might 
> be right. :)

Well look up "quantum erasure" on Google or check out
this site here:
http://grad.physics.sunysb.edu/~amarch/

If you modify the classic double slit experiment in
such that you obtain which-way information on the
photons going thru the slit, you lose the interference
pattern. If you obtain the which-way information but
then destroy it before you can measure it, the pattern
comes back. Even when the information is contained in
a different set of photons than the ones going thru
the slits.  

So there is experimental precedent for the notion that
photons "sense" their enviroment non-locally and
conspire with other photons to boggle our minds. But
keep in mind that from a photon's POV, space-time does
not exist in the same sense as it does for inertial
reference frames such as we are used to.

To a photon, all the space-time along its travel path
is squished down to a single point of "here and now".
It is only to those of us encumbered by matter that
time has any meaning at all. Why we should have to
wait for photons (finite speed of light) when those
same photons do not wait for anything at all is a
mystery that math can describe but not clarify.

     

Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"God doesn't play dice with the universe." - Albert Einstein

"Einstein, don't tell God what to do." - Neils Bohr

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