From: Reason (reason@exratio.com)
Date: Tue Jul 24 2001 - 20:18:13 MDT
> Back and forth
> Another disguised many worlds theory, says Deutsch, is John Cramer's
> "transactional" interpretation in which information passes backwards and
> forwards through time. When you measure the position of an atom,
> it sends a
> message back to its earlier self to change its trajectory accordingly.
>
> But as the system gets more complicated, the number of messages explodes.
> Soon, says Deutsch, it becomes vastly greater than the number of particles
> in the Universe. The full quantum evolution of a system as big as the
> Universe consists of an exponentially large number of classical processes,
> each of which contains the information to describe a whole universe. So
> Cramer's idea forces the multiverse on you, says Deutsch.
That's an interesting take on the transactional model.
(http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/tiqm/TI_toc.html -- well worth a
read for those of us who learned QM the Copenhagen/statistical way).
I shall have to sit down and think about that. The use of what basically
seems to be information and processing power as a fundamental indestructable
quantity akin to energy in this particular context is something else I'll
have to sit down and think about.
The rest of that article is almost an aside to claiming that the
transactional model is a many-universe model in disguise. Any useful
comments from the physicists in the house?
Reason
http://www.exratio.com/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:09:07 MST