The Quantum Handshake John G. Cramer The Quantum Handshake Entanglement, Nonlocality and Transactions 123 John G. Cramer Department of Physics University of Washington Seattle, WA USA ISBN 978-3-319-24640-6 ISBN 978-3-319-24642-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24642-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2015952772 Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) This book is dedicated to Gilbert N. Lewis, John A. Wheeler, and Richard P. Feynman, who first envisioned the advanced-retarded handshake. Foreword Since its inception, quantum mechanics has been fraught with conceptual diffi- culties. What started as a noble attempt to understand the behavior of atoms, morphed into a set of working rules for calculating certain “observable” quantities. These working rules have proven amazingly effective at dealing with a wide range of phenomena whose outcomes are statistical in nature, while attempts to understand the inner workings at a deeper level have met with immense frustration. My CalTech colleague, the late Richard Feynman, put it this way: One might still like to ask: How does it work? What is the machinery behind the law? No one has found any machinery behind the law. No one can explain any more than we have just explained. No one will give you any deeper representation of the situation. We have no ideas about a more basic mechanism from which these results can be deduced. [1] All scientific advances require suspension of disbelief—if they followed directly from what came before, they would have already been discovered. The brilliant insights of the 1920’s that led to our present situation were all of the form “If we use this particular mathematical representation, then the answer for the (…) comes out right”, where (…) was, in many cases, certain spectral line energies of the hydrogen atom. While one must admire the fortitude of those who crafted these mathematical tricks, the result certainly does not constitute “understanding” in the sense that the term is used in the rest of science. Bohr and his followers attempted to remedy the situation with their “Copenhagen Interpretation”, which has caused more confusion than the mathematics itself. As Ed Jaynes put it: …all these years it has seemed obvious to me as it did to Einstein and Schrödinger that the Copenhagen Interpretation is a mass of contradictions and irrationality and that, while theoretical physicists can, of course, continue to make progress in the mathematical details and computational techniques, there is no hope of any further progress in our basic understanding of nature until this conceptual mess is cleared up. [2] Faced with this situation for what is now nearly a century, there have been two distinct positions taken by those in the field. The first is pragmatic, as articulated by Feynman: vii viii Foreword Fig. 0.1 Carver Mead (1934–), Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology, was the originator of the term Moore’s Law. He discovered that transistors would get faster, better, cooler and cheaper as they were miniaturized, thereby blazing the trail that has led to the microelectronics revolution Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘but how can it be like that?’ because you will get ‘down the drain’, into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that. [3] Others believe that it will be understood, but may take a long time. John Archibald Wheeler said it well: Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that when in a decade, a century, or a millennium we grasp it, we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? How could we have been so stupid for so long? [4] My own belief is that Wheeler is correct, but, instead of just one idea, a whole constellation of interlocking ideas must come together before the puzzle can be solved. High on the list of these ideas is the bidirectional arrow of time. We humans live deep in the grips of thermodynamics, and all of our common experience is conditioned by it. To us it is natural that events in the past determine our situation in the here and now, but inconceivable that events in the future are affecting us in the present. So deeply is this conviction held that we never stop to ask from whence this asymmetry arises. The laws of electromagnetism are com- pletely symmetrical with respect to both time and space. They always have two solutions: 1. A “retarded solution” that runs forward in time; and 2. An “advanced solution” that runs backward in time. In spite of this symmetry, it is common practice, based on our thermal experi- ence, to adopt the first solution and simply ignore the second. Already in 1909, Einstein had clearly stated the issue: In the first case the electric field is calculated from the totality of the processes producing it, and in the second case from the totality of processes absorbing it… Both kinds of repre- sentation can always be used, regardless of how distant the absorbing bodies are imagined Foreword ix to be. Thus one cannot conclude that that the [retarded solution] is any more special than the solution [containing equal parts advanced and retarded]. [5] At the quantum level, things are quite different from our thermal world: When an atom in an excited state is looking for a way to lose its energy, it must find one or more partners willing and able to receive that energy, regardless of how distant they are. The Einstein solution, half advanced half retarded, creates a perfect “hand- shake” by which both atoms can accomplish their energy transfer. In this book, John Cramer gives us a simple way of resolving many quantum mysteries by adopting the handshake as the common coinage of quantum interac- tion. It is by far the most economical way to visualize what is going on in these “mind-twisters” without departing from the highly successful mathematics of existing quantum mechanics. Seattle Carver Mead July 2015 References 1. R.P. Feynman, R.B. Leighton, M. Sands,The Feynman Lectures, vol. 3 (Addison-Wesley, Reading, 1965). ISBN 0201021188 2. E. Jaynes, Probability in Quantum Theory, in Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information ed. by W. Zurek (Addison-Wesley, Reading, 1990), pp. 381–403 3. R.P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1967), p. 129 4. J.A. Wheeler, How Come the Quantum? Ann. New York Acad. Sci. 480, 304–316 (1986) 5. A. Einstein, On the Present Status of the Radiation Problem (Zum gegenwärtigen Stand des Strahlungsproblems), Physcialische Zeitschrift 10 (1909); translated in A. Beck, P. Havas, (eds.), The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. 2, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1989) Preface In 1900 there were clouds on the scientific horizon, unexplained phenomena that foretold the coming of the great intellectual revolution that was quantum mechanics. (See Chap. 2.) Today the scientific horizon is not without similar clouds. Quantum field theory, our standard model for understanding the funda- mental interactions between particles and fields, tells us that the energy content of the quantum vacuum should be 10120 times larger than it actually is. At the interface between general relativity and quantum field theory, information seems to be vanishing at event horizons in a very unphysical way (see Sect. 6.21). Within black holes, singularities are predicted to exist that are completely beyond the reach of contemporary physics. Quantum chromodynamics, our standard model of par- ticles, works very well in agreeing with high-energy physics experiments, but it employs two dozen arbitrary particle masses and interaction strengths. We have no idea where these values came from, how they are related, or how they were set in the early universe. We can anticipate that our current understanding of Nature at the smallest and largest scales is at best a rickety scaffolding that must inevitably be replaced or improved. It is likely that another scientific revolution is on the way. Quantum mechanics will certainly play a key role in this revolution, but it is currently ham- pered by our lack of understanding of its inner mechanisms and our inability to visualize the many counter-intuitive aspects of quantum behavior. The Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics, presented and illustrated in this book, provides tools for visualization, for understanding quantum processes, and for designing new experiments.