John Cramer, inventor of the transcational interpretation of quantum theory (not to be confused with transactions in software or hardware, although you may be surprised to learn that they aren’t totally unrelated! ) is apparently going to try (here at UW) to see if there is any juice behind his interpretation by looking for possible violations of quantum theory in the form of retrocasual signals. In related news Andrew Steane has an intriguing paper out on foundational questions where he pursues ideas similar to the transactional interpetation (quant-ph/0611047). Me? I love the transaction interpretation because mucking with time really makes my head spin (and time is such a strange, strange beast!)
O brave new quantum world!
Interesting! However, Cramer’s transactional interpretation does not seem to have much of a hope of being true because it has never been developed for more than one particle. It relies on being able to think of the wavefunction as a wave evolving in time in 3-space, playing the same role as the electromagnetic field in the Feynman-Wheeler theory. In other words, it cannot yet account for entanglement, so as a good quantum information theorist you should be highly skeptical.
Steane’s paper looks interesting, so you can expect to see some comments on my blog once I have digested it. I have too many deadlines coming up right now, so it might not be for a couple of weeks.
There is an interesting page here
http://www.analogsf.com/0612/altview.shtml
in which Cramer speaks about his future
(or possible) experiment.