🚀 go-pugleaf

bweiner@ruhets.rutgers.edu (Benjamin Weiner) writes:

>mitsu@nic.cerf.net (Mitsuharu Hadeishi) writes:

>> [Sarfatti quote] the transmitter photon retarded wave arrives at T and is
>> detected. Information on the setting of the transmitter at event T is
>> sent backwards-in-time by an advanced transmitter photon wave. The
>> advanced wave arrives at S just as the photon pair is being emitted.
>> This is what Fred Hoyle calls a "loop in time" between events S and T.

>This is meaningless.  What is an "advanced photon wave"?  I think 
>Sarfatti is trying to talk about advanced and retarded in the sense
>of potentials in electrodynamics. 

I think that what Sarfatti is talking about is a garbled version
of the "transactional interpretation" of quantum mechanics, in
which making a measurement in the present causes information to be
transmitted backwards in time via the time-evolution operator 
(simply using the post-measurement wave function as final-value data
rather than initial-value data) and subsequently (if that is the right
word) transmitted forward to all distant places where something
is correlated with the observable being measured.  This interpretation
is really equivalent to the Copenhagen one in the sense of what it
predicts.  You shouldn't be able to use it to justify superluminal
communication via "Feynman zig-zag" any more than you could using
instantaneous collapse.

-- 
Matt McIrvin   mcirvin@husc.harvard.edu   Long live short .sigs