Zoë ([info]nurice) wrote,
@ 2007-02-15 17:15:00
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The Quantum
Just a thought: what if the problem behind non-locality was actually a consequence of backwards time-travel?

Here's how I'm thinking about this: we have to set boundary conditions for any eigensolutions to a system - for instance, in a particle in a box we get a host of discrete solutions given zero boundary conditions - and so, what if all these collapsed quantum wavefunctions were just a product of the future boundary conditions? I measure a particle at point A in time, and at some future space-time measure it to be B, and in the meantime it waves around like some string?

Don't we describe standing waves in terms of two propagating waves in space - one forwards, one backwards? Would time not act analogously?

I have to think about this more. This would in fact give rise to the superposition of all possible paths as described by QFT....

Back to work. (Statistical update: working for Ray Laflamme, working on 5-qubit quantum state purification protocols in liquid state NMR - about to run my first test tomorrow. My kittens are a year old and adorable. I love my boyfriend very much. Applying to the bigass grad schools is a bitch (suck it, GREs). Running a marathon in May. Pretty much haven't seen any of my friends this year - I miss you all desperately. Feeling busy and smiley!)



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[info]vinas
2007-02-16 09:50 am UTC (link)
Remember Philosophy.

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[info]mporter
2007-02-22 11:47 pm UTC (link)
This is an idea with a considerable heritage, but no-one has ever demonstrated that it can work, to the degree of exactness that, say, Bohmian mechanics possesses. Some people you might look up: Costa de Beauregard, Huw Price, Mark Hadley. John Cramer's transactional interpretation has the appearance of being a backwards-in-time theory too, but when you look at his actual technical papers, you find he's still using the quantum framework of complex-valued probability amplitudes (rather than 0-to-1 real-valued probabilities) which I think is one of the things that needs explaining in QM. - You might also want to look up the "Feynman checkerboard model" of an electron in 1 space dimension - I think it switches stochastically between 4 modes of travel - left and forward in time, right and forward in time, left and backward in time, right and backward in time - and you get back the Dirac equation. But again, I think he's using probability amplitudes, and not just probabilities, and the aim (in my opinion) should include the derivation of the use of probability amplitudes from an underlying framework which only uses probabilities (since we know how to interpret a probability ontologically).

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