Jeff, this sounds ultra-interesting, but my lack of background prevents me from understanding what you've written. Can you please include some more detail? Like, what are the Cramer thing, the Wheeler-Feynman thing, the Conway-Kochen thing, the Rietdijk–Putnam–Penrose thing, and the Bohm thing that "still stirs" ? Thanks, Dan On Jun 30, 2014, at 2:12 PM, Jeff Caldwell <jeffrey.d.caldwell@gmail.com> wrote:
I hope to better understand the curious case of the photon. It has no frame of reference and, were it conscious, would perceive itself to be emitted and absorbed simultaneously, i.e. no time passing between the events. With zero time between emission and absorption, whimsy allows me to think of emitter and absorber as in some sense touching, albeit one is an ancient star and the other a cone in my living eye. Zero time means zero distance, in my book, although applying that rule to the no-frame-of-reference photon is probably a category error. Cramer's transactional interpretation, inspired by Wheeler-Feynman time-symmetric theory, has both forward and backward-in-time waves between emitter and absorber, agreeing upon the transaction before (as? timey-wimey words ...) it takes place, which leaves precious little room for the free will electrons have if you or I do, John Conway and Simon Kocken say, and leaving no room at all for deciding whether or not to slide a detector into a photon's path after the photon has been emitted. Emitters, detectors and photons have united, and their agreements will be kept! At least, in this regime, Rietdijk–Putnam–Penrose can be resolved in the affirmative.
And now pilot waves. Bohm still stirs. Rod Sutherland combines pilot waves and the transactional interpretation in "Causally Symmetric Bohm Model", http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0601095v2.pdf.